Last month, the Amarok team entered the Sears Retail Hackathon, sponsored by Sears, Apigee and Apptentive, and organized by Brand Garage. The hackathon took place the weekend of July 24th-26th 2015, at the Startup Hall on the University of Washington Campus.
At the end of the weekend, we were selected as the second-place finisher, with a $1,000 cash prize, narrowly missing the $10,000 grand prize.
Our project (code-named “Buildshare”), is a social network that helps homeowners share and discover home improvement projects and features Sears & Kmart products. Users are able to share photos, videos, make blog posts and tag products. Adding & sharing products is easy and fun, due to a new user copy-paste plugin we built where users can copy any Sears/Kmart URL and paste it right onto their BuildShare project. We’ve released a preview version the copy-paste functionality as jquery-paste, an open-source jQuery plugin on GitHub.
Overall the event was a good team-building exercise, and allowed us to work with some technology we don’t normally get to experiment with, in a low-risk environment.
This was the first project where Amarok had used sails.js, an application framework built on Express.js and Node. Using Sails was a major factor in being able to quickly develop a usable site. We’ve posted our entire stack for this project on stackshare.io.
Kudos to the Brand Garage team for helping companies like Sears, Apigee and Appetitive build their developer ecosystems.
