Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Summer Activities

Are you looking for something to do during your summer vacation?

Here are some local field trips:

Intel Museum in Santa Clara
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/company-overview/intel-museum.html

Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale
http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/

Computer History Museum in Mountain View
http://www.computerhistory.org

Hacker DoJo in Mountain View
http://hackerdojo.com/

And here are some professional organizations, free or inexpensive to join:

Silicon Valley Java Developers Meetup
http://www.meetup.com/sv-web-jug

San Francisco Java Users Group
http://www.sfjava.org/

Silicon Valley Forum
http://SVForum.org
(Make sure to ask for the student discount!)


Monday, August 12, 2013

You are invited to a hackathon

Schools, computer science classes and individual participants are invited to participate in the Bay Area "Internet of Things" hackathon, the first of four regional hackathons sponsored by AT&T to build mobile apps for multiple devices (mobile, desktop, and other). The Bay Area hackathon will be held at NestGSV, 425 Broadway, Redwood City, Calif., on Aug. 16 to 17, 2013 and will focus on gaming and artificial intelligence. Prizes for the event are:
· 1st place: $1,000 cash
· 2nd place: $500 cash
· 3rd place: $200 cash

First- and second-place finishers also will receive all-expense-paid trips to the National Accelerator Demo in Las Vegas, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show® from January 3-5, 2014, where they will have the opportunity to pitch their hack and compete for the $20,000 grand prize.
The long-term objective of the hackathon is education. School projects and school teams are invited to take creation -- and not just consumption -- of mobile apps mainstream. Judges from AT&T and Intel will give equal weight to each entrant's ability to articulate what the app does, the originality of the idea, and the technical challenges confronted and overcome.

“Internet of Things” Mobile App Hackathons are competitive events, sponsored by the AT&T Developer Program, and designed for attendees (technical and non-technical) to build mobile apps, enjoy great food, and compete for awesome prizes across various categories. Most importantly, the hackathons will introduce coders to the latest cutting-edge tools to help deploy their own apps with a website backend, fully hosted in the cloud.

Participants are free to code in the language with which they are most comfortable, whether it's Objective C, Java, Javascript, HTML, C #, Dot Net, XNA. Those who might have rusty programming skills will have live support from local senior developers, as well as from AT&T to help speed coding.

For more on the AT&T Developer program, please visit developer.att.com. For more on the "Internet of Things" mobile app hackathons, please visit or sign up at http://hacknest-sr.eventbrite.com