The Hackathon will be informal and will run at the same time as the Roundtables in a separate part of the UnCon space. The Hackathon space will be a lounge atmosphere with couches, beverages, food, etc. People can work on whatever they want to but we’ll have planned projects lined up and a crowd of Sugar Engineers ready and willing to help out with anything you're working on. Whether that's helping you get a local Sugar development environment setup, help you troubleshoot some problems, or design a fancy CRM implementation or integration with another application.
The only prize for Sugar Developers at the Hackathon is knowledge (meaning there will be no "winner"). But if a Sugar Developer creates a project or prototype and stands up and presents it at the end of UnCon then they’ll also get a coveted SugarCRM UnCon hoodie.
However, we've done some homework and prepared some projects that you can work. We're in the process of creating a public GitHub repository with the UnCon materials included. So it's a good idea to create a GitHub account if you haven't yet already.
Internet of Things
In an effort to try something outside the realm of “traditional” CRM and to make things a bit fun, one of the Hackathon projects I’ve planned is to explore Internet of Things solutions to CRM problems with Sugar 7 at the center. We’ve got some prototyping gear (arduinos, raspberry pis, sensors, leds, LCDs, motors, etc) for use with designs. We’re using Cylon.js and a Sugar API wrapper for Node.js which will allow Sugar Developers to work entirely in JavaScript to quickly build prototype IoT integrations that connect to Sugar. This is also a fun way to learn the Sugar 7 REST API. We're putting together a few examples that should get folks up and running a manner of minutes, even if you've never worked with microcontrollers or any other hardware before.
Sidecar Chrome Dev Tools plug-in
This is a project that a few Sugar Engineers have been working on off and on for a couple months. This tool allows a Sugar Developer to pull up a Sugar 7 specific debug tools that allow you to visually inspect all the different Views and Layouts in the current Sugar 7 window. We think this would be a very useful tool for Sugar Developers, whether they are new or experienced.
Dashlets
Building Dashlets is a great way to customize Sugar quickly or to integrate the Sugar user interface with a 3rd party system. It’s a great “newbie” project for any of you new folks and we'll have a team of Sugar Engineers standing by to help.
AND MORE!
See you at SugarCon! There's still time to register!