Facebooks hosts 'hackathon' for Harvard, MIT, Brown

“Oh my god. I think that just worked,” said Daniel Ben-David, a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expressing a sentiment that was familiar to everyone in the room.

The 18-hour, Facebook-hosted Battle of Boston Hackathon on Saturday and Sunday was exploding with new ideas, lines of code and cans of caffeine. Twenty-four teams, ranging from one to five people from MIT, Brown and Harvard, worked on projects ranging from event-based maps to cell phone reminder services.

A hackathon is an event where people get together and “hack” on new projects. It’s essentially like a quick sprint in the world of software development -- people come up with new ideas and build them from scratch in a short amount of time.

Facebook has sponsored an annual hackathon for college students for the past two years. Students from Georgia Tech, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and several other schools have gotten the chance to compete for an all-expense paid trip to Facebook’s headquarters to compete against each other for big prizes.

Why is hacking such a big deal in the software development culture?

“[I like the] implication that you’re going to finish something. Everyone’s very purposeful and focused,” said Martin Camacho, a sophomore math major at Harvard University. Camacho’s four-person team worked on a music discovery app.

Some students were no strangers to hackathons.

Alex Rubin, a sophomore computer science and physics major at Brown University, had been to hackathons as an intern at Facebook last summer.

One of his team members, Devin Finzer -- a junior computer science and math major also at Brown -- had been to two other hackathons. They, along with two others from Brown were working on a website for students to ask questions and upvote relevant questions during lecture.

There were also plenty of new faces at the Hackathon. A team of four freshman girls from MIT were working on a photo sharing service for Facebook, where friends could upload photos from the same event into one album.

“We looked at what makes people want to leave Facebook and what they want,” explained Rebecca Zhang, one of the team members.

Fifteen hours into the hackathon, projects started to come into shape and teams began to work on improving and adding extra features.

“Two hours ago I was swearing because Google cut off access to their search API,” said Ben-David, who had been awake for 21 hours at the time.

The search API -- short for Application Programming Interface, which is similar to a coding dictionary -- was an integral part of his project, a service where users could compare when they started liking a certain musical band in comparison to their friends or the popular trend.

But at 11 a.m., Ben-David said that he could have stopped working if he wanted to, but he was keen to work on some of the suggestions Facebook engineers -- who acted as mentors during the hackathon -- gave him.

Each team gave two-minute presentations about their ideas after the 18-hour coding session ended. Following the presentations, Facebook engineers chose winners from each school -- both Camacho and Finzer’s teams won first place at their respective schools. They received Beats by Dr. Dre headphones and a trip to the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. to compete against winners of other university hackathons. Ben-David won the creativity prize for the project he named “Hipster.”

After the prize ceremony, as the hackers left the room -- which some had not left for over 18 hours, except for bathroom breaks or trips down the hallway on a RipStik -- some were still thinking of continuing to develop their product.

“I think it would be cool to convince a few professors to try [our program],” Finzer said.

Joanna Kao is a Spring 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.