HackDay St. Petersburg - event report

On September 5-6, in Russia, for the first time, an event of the new format - HackDay St. Petersburg ( http://hackday.ru ) was held. 150 participants from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Helsinki and Kharkov gathered together under the slogan “from idea to prototype over the weekend.” The culmination of the event was HackDay Demofest - the presentation of projects developed by the participants for two days of hard work.

The HackDay format was developed in Silicon Valley in 2005. Now similar meetings of developers spread around the world. To transfer this idea to our country took a researcher company Yahoo! Yuri Lifshits. The event was supported by Microsoft, Marva.ru, DevExperts and Yota.


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In two days, participants developed 11 projects. These include VKontakte integration with Android phones, the schedule of trains on the iPhone, a system of private announcements on payment terminals, a robot artist, a semantic analyzer of a live journal, a sentiment analyzer in texts, a system of alerts about travel plans, a fashion news aggregator.

In the framework of HackDay St. Petersburg 12 master classes were held. Mikhail Chernomordikov (evangelist of Microsoft technologies in Russia) spoke about the development using Silverlight and IE8. Fedor Golubev (Yandex) spoke about the capabilities of Yandex Maps. Thanks to HackDay, many participants got their first experience in developing applications for VKontakte, Android and iPhone. Links to prototypes and materials of master classes can be found on the website http://hackday.ru .

Yuri Lifshits, organizer of HackDay: “The format of our event is in demand in a variety of environments: in companies - to mobilize the creative energy of employees, in universities - to create innovative projects, in a startup community - to join teams. Investors are promising developments, and companies - future employees. HackDay can be the first step to great success. For example, the prototype xoopit.com was created on Yahoo! HackDay 2008, and a year later the company was bought for $ 20 million. ”

As the next step, it is planned to conduct HackDay in Helsinki, Kiev, Moscow and once again in St. Petersburg.

Feedback from participants on Twitter: #spbhackday