Hack.Central Hackathon at the Garage!!!

  • Article

I am on a plane returning to the Midwest from Redmond Washington and wanted share what an awesome experience I just had. I was just at a Microsoft sponsored Hackathon that was held at Microsoft’s “Garage”. The Garage is a magical place where you can learn new technical things and build new technical gadgets.

IMG_0345

One of the best amazing things at the Garage is the “Makers Garage”. This is a space that makes anyone who has a workroom start to drool. It is a workroom on steroids that is basically a makers space with all kinds of tools and a few toys that people have built. There are hand tools, 3D printers, a laser cutter, a drill press, an Oscilloscope, and other tools. In addition to a vast array of tools there are all kinds of parts. From nuts and bolts to breadboards and electronic parts. There are bins of motors, servos, transistors, LEDs, timer ICs, resisters, and much more. All these parts are there for the taking for the project you are working on. Just like it is your own workroom! There were also some cool projects and toys people built sitting around the Garage. The photo of the robot below is one of the things just sitting around.

At this hackaton we were broken into three groups and worked on three different projects

  • GroupA – Build something with Azure HD Insight / Hadoop – a big data project
  • GroupB – Build something with WinJS
  • GroupC – Build and IoT Project

The groups built some really cool stuff – I was on the IoT team and it has me really interested in building out some IoT projects of my own. I am sure you will see these on this blog at a future date. I was especially impressed with what the big data group built with Azure HD insight – in just one day they had an awesome app that did a twitter DVR. It was really impressive, cool, and usable.

IMG_0343 IMG_0350 IMG_0352

P.S. A few of us stopped by Bungie while we were out in Redmond. The Master Chief wanted to take a photo with me as you can see below… We also played foosball until a large Security guard kicked us out. Microsoft doesn’t own Bungie anymore. Opps Smile

20150413_164719