The San Diego Windows Phone 8 Hackathon held at Nokia on May 11th 2013 was a huge success! I want to express my sincere appreciation and respect to all who participated. We had 33 Windows Phone 8 Apps submitted after a mere 4 hours of development time. That’s quite an impressive feat, especially considering the quality of the apps that were presented! I hope everyone that participated will put the finishing touches on their apps and submit them to the Windows Phone Store. (And let me know!)
I took a new approach to presenting code topics at this event and I am quite pleased how it turned out. We held 3 sessions each 1 hour long. Between each session was 1 hour for hands on lab. In the past I’ve shown different codebases for my presentation vs. any hands on labs. At this event I decided to try to use the same codebase for both. This meant I could show off a working version of the hands on labs before attendees would start them. This gave the attendees greater understanding about what they were about to do and how the code topics work in an app setting instead of some simplified, non-best practices sample. This worked tremendously well. I received many comments from attendees about how much they loved seeing the code first then writing the code themselves, and how that was much more effective than seeing two different samples. The apps shown off during the hackathon were evidence to me that my approach was effective and good.
This event was not my first; however it was my first with 111 attendees! It was also my first as a Nokia Developer Champion. I had a blast and the atmosphere and enthusiasm of attendees told me that everyone else did too. I look forward to the many follow up sessions we discussed during the event and other events coming up in the future!
Link to event materials: NokiaWP8May2013