We held the event on the 14th floor, with a balcony overlooking a daylong storm.

Most Potential

PS119 Elementary School

Eight (8) elementary and middle school children from Brooklyn’s PS119 banded together to share ideas, work together and profile their school. They learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and hand-coded their own site, deploying to Firebase.

In memory of a dearly departed winner and volunteer Aeryk Blair, the kids were our first award-winners, receiving toys and craft kits thanks to generous scholarships from three important friends of the community:

• Johnson Hor
• Jaime Sigillo Dever
• Ben Zeitman

Congratulations to all of the children, their teacher Frank Jump, and their mentor Dan Zeitman for an inspiring display of discipline and engineering:

https://ps119-78920.firebaseapp.com

Best Pitch

Complain About Your Mom

In a direct implementation of their initial pitch, this team of two talented women capitalized on a major use of social media: complaining. In open-hearted fashion, they took it to the next level and created a community of complaints and complainers.

You can pile on, or one-up the complainer, resulting in a flurry of empathy.

This working Web app, along with audience interaction and reaction, is marketed to teens, and was built mobile-first. It was a great way to start our showcase and the team worked harmoniously all weekend, representing the values of our event. Also, their presentation was just funny. Well done.

• Lisa Mogull
• Clair Seager

Best Use of Firebase

Muse

With a background in modeling and no experience coding, one woman found a team of developers and designers to produce a stunning prototype of her solution to the craziness of photoshoot and audition scheduling.

Any exclusive community of professionals can use this model of queuing and on-demand arrival.

Using Firebase, the team produced a signup process, storage, and analytics with just a few lines of code. The team was able to focus on delivering an experience using the Xcode simulator that represented a lot of very fast work. All done over the weekend, their app is now open source. Bravo!

• Zenun Vucetovic
• Gurinder Singh
• Brianna Morris
• Chris Morris
• Najm Sheikh

Best Community App

Witness

Their tagline is “Be More Than a Bystander.” Witness is a tool for citizens to report a perceived crime by sending pictures, videos, and location to their local police department. View their presentation:

This opt-in app is the new neighborhood watch.

It helps communities to provide useful information and evidence that can be used in a court of law. Users can easily tag and describe details to help officers and responders act with greater speed and accuracy.

This team’s working iOS demo explored the legality of this tool, as well as its practicality. They had no prior experience with Xcode, but delivered full functionality in the simulator within 24 hours of their first instruction from one of our Camp Counselors. Not bad!

• Xiaoting Kuang
• Matt Wartenberg
• Talib Bacchus
• Dianna Reuter
• Liz Kahn

Coolest App

RGB Processor

Using OpenCV to process images, this app allows any series of three graphics to display simultaneously. The result are outlines that display only when certain colors of light shine.

This sparked the imagination of the audience in a way that branched conversation into parties, t-shirts, simultaneous video, and just plain how-did-you-do-that. This one-person team made us all smile.

• Jay Hu

Frontier Award

Reserve Repack Reminder

What do you do when you could literally code anything you want? How do you decide to spend your time in between helping others? One idea is to learn a new programming language and open source your demo.

That is exactly what local badass Logan Donovan did for the weekend. Teaching herself Elixir and Phoenix, she solved a personal problem to show the power of this new language and framework. Her app allows instructors and skydivers to easily create long-term reminders for the safety of their reserve chutes.

A jumper’s reserve parachute has to be certified and packed by a professional every 180 days. If it has not been repacked within that span of time, the jumper cannot jump. Forgetting this can be heartbreaking and expensive. This fully functional, live-updating, email-round-tripping app gave us all a lesson on the benefits of Elixir.

• Logan Donovan

Best Use of Open Data

Can I Park Here?

Drawing from information in the Department of Transportation database, this app combines the myriad of parking rules based on time and place into a simple display of where it is legal and illegal to park right now. The simplicity of color-coded maps in a simple mockup inspired our audience to suggest some additions.

If there is one lesson we have learned over the years, it is that when an idea is simple and effective, the first signal is that a listener will want to try and improve it. Save those suggestions for version two, because you already have something. Ship it!

• Michael Wissner

Best Design

PartyCrashers

This new team banded together to create “an insider’s guide to free food and drink” at the city’s best gallery openings and events. More than that, PartyCrashers is a platform for creative partygoers to stay informed on upcoming events and easily share real-time reviews on the food and drinks being served.

Even more than THAT, this app—exquisitely designed and presented—is a platform for event producers to drive desirable traffic to their events. The team wrote a crawler to find events, used Firebase to catalogue and store the data, and presented it all in a responsive, imaginative way.

We all totally want to have this app. Five stars.

• Nicholas Fjellberg Swerdlowe
• Paul Scolnick
• Zav Shotan
• Avi Wilensky

Best Student

TechTips

All weekend, this 13-year-old listened to talks, observed others, and privately worked on a fun animation of his own. Using Scratch from MIT, his character drama talks about cyber piracy and safety when selling devices without deleting the information on that device.

After showing his cross-platform work, he showed us how he built it using loops and code progressions—with zero help. A person who can bootstrap their own education like this deserves an award. Never stop.

• Justin Ferrao

Best Collaboration

iGottaGo

Here is an other example of a group solving a personal problem. An iOS app necessary to live a better life, iGottaGo identifies the nearest, best public toilet for those emergency situations.

Using React Native, MapKit, and Firebase, this team was multi-disciplinary and shared the work so effectively that it took all four of them to show the demo. This undeniably useful project got kudos from the audience as well as several suggestions for viable business models.

• Dave Lee
• Yuke Liang
• Vincent Occhiogrosso
• Jay Hu

Most Educational

BotSplainer Tutorial

What do you do at a hackathon when you have family members to educate, you have zero experience in the event theme technologies, and you are a single-person team? Well, if you are the co-founder and director of the local chapter of Women Who Code, you blow minds by issuing a State of the Union speech.

After a brief survey of chat bot examples and experiences, Elizabeth taught the crowd about PullString and we launched into a discussion about the difficulties in scripting a great experience. It is fair to say that we each learned something and wanted more.

• Elizabeth Ferrao

Best New Developer

Briggs

Barry Rowe

At the start of the weekend, one young man arrived early. Without a machine with which to program, he had only his iPhone. He arrived without an idea, no team, without even a notion of what to expect. After a bit of discussion, he decided to design a game similar to his favorite 2048.

He stuck to his idea when he could find no one to help, and eventually came to the organizers for advice. Taking every word of this advice, and applying himself to find more help, a person of true potential never gives up.

The next day, when his coding partner had to leave early, this winner did not relent. We helped him find another developer and machine to work on. Refining his idea and presentation, he stood on stage alone, and last.

The organizers and judges recognize the challenges we all face on the road to success. A student with only the barest glimpse of the basics in programming, someone who seemed undeterred by the daunting challenge of building a game, this developer’s imagination shined underneath pure grit and determination. Onward!

• Amadou Dao

Grand Prize

Diwakar Goel & Eugene Yee

Left to Right: Winners Diwakar Goel and Eugene Yee with Organizers Dan Zeitman and Nilay Yener

Every event has its heroes, people who only want to help and want no credit. The Camp Counselor program is full of mentors like this, but Manhattan was different.

Area man Eugene Yee has helped winners before. Phone calls, on a weekend, to help some stranger and his son with an app to prevent bullying in schools? Yes, let us talk for two hours. Need help promoting an event and attracting great talent to help out? Here is my contact list, oh, and I will show up both days and teach a class on Xcode. That is Eugene, and that would have been enough to win.

But then there is Diwakar Goel. After winning a fellowship at Developer Camp San Francisco 2016, he flew himself out to New York City and put himself up—just for the chance to help others.

He critiqued every pitch. He helped every team. He gave up his own laptop for the entire final day. He had a question or a suggestion after every presentation. Selfless is not a fine enough word for Diwakar. He stole the Grand Prize from Eugene, but both men were awarded heavily for their embodiment of the values of our organization.

Helpful, patient, kind, insightful, open-hearted, and smart.

Thank you to all of our participants and attendees! You are why we do this.