nwHacks

On February 27 and 28th, over 500 students attended Western Canada's largest hackathon at the University of British Columbia, nwHacks. I got to experience the other side of hackathons as I usually attend as a hacker.

After getting our table set up, we saw a continuous stream of curious students drop by. We introduced them to Azure, pointed out some useful resources, and encouraged them include Azure in their hack for chance to win our API prize. Next was the opening ceremony where representatives from sponsor companies gave short pitches about their API challenge. It was my first time talking in front of such a big audience!

In the evening, Principal Technical Evangelist, Sergii gave a tech talk on the different services available on Azure. One particular slide that stood out was "Pizza as a Service". It was a great analogy of the cloud!

After a few hours of sleep (we were answering questions on Slack late at night!), the team came back the next day for judging. It was a tough choice as we saw many awesome projects. The winning team was PlanIt, a mobile app to help make event planning more easier. We were impressed by their design and depth in exploring Microsoft technologies such as Xamarin and Azure Mobile Apps.

[embed]https://youtu.be/xtin0rFwGW4[/embed]

After the event, I contacted the winning and asked them what their future plans were. One of the members, Behrouz Salehipour responded.
"As you already know, PlanIt is a mobile app based on event planning. We basically wanted to remove the hassles that come with planning events around a large group of people. This is mainly done with the features we are implementing so that managing these events are simple and easy. Moving forward, the team will consist of Farzad Daei, Farzad Fallahi and myself. Currently, we are working very hard to release PlanIt as quickly and cleanly as possible and we have moved PlanIt under a new organization that we have started, known as Baxsoftware. The current plan for the app can be viewed at baxsoftware.com and we keep up-to-date information for people that are interested in the project."

A big thanks to all the organizers, volunteers and participants for their hard work in making this event happen!

Follow me on twitter or instagram ( @misslisabear) and stay tuned for more posts about student events and Azure content!