Wow, Hackathons are an experience. Firstly I was amazed by the turn out, realistically probably 40 teams all competed in a 12 hour hackathon for Evernote at the Computer Science Department at Berkeley. I found the atmosphere to be supportive and fiercely competitive at the same time. Hackathon's are a strange creation and I've struggled to come up with a parallel in history. But that's for another post.

The Application - EverDone

The project we worked on was Everdone. Simply put, EverDone is an organizational assistant. Every Saturday we'll collect your notes from the week and place them into the EverDone notebook for you to easily know what your tasks are for the week.

One list. All your tasks.

We also implemented a hashtag based organizing system, so you can write something like "#homework finish my paper" and we'll categorize it under homework.

The user flow is relatively straightforward, we start off with the main page and introduce the application.

After the OAuth cycle, we need to get the user's email in order to send them their to do list every week.

Finally we give them an instant refresh, any to do created in the last week will get sent to their EverDone folder.

You can check out the code on my Github.

What did I learn?

I learned how intense hackathons are. it being my first one, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. There are a few shortcomings in our product that made it difficult for us to place.

• It is incredible what can be built in 13 hours.
• Our application, although built didn't demo very well. It's an invisible service that helps you keep track of your to dos. It wasn't something you would interact with directly, which we struggled to present effectively.
• You get nervous presenting in front of people. We didn't really prepare enough for our demonstration and were under-prepared.
• There are a lot of intelligent people at UC Berkeley!

There's also some interesting possibilities to building on this application. A mobile app integration could be a nice plus, if it basically pulled out all of your to dos, attached some metadata (which notebook & note) and you could organize them that way. Maybe some day!