Happy Halloween at YHack 2014!

Don't be scared...it's just hacking!

Do you want to spend a different type of Halloween weekend? Are you “close” to New Haven, CT?  Do you like to hack?  If you replied yes to these questions, come spend the weekend with us at YHack, at Yale University (Lux et veritas, and all of that…).

Progress Software Sponsors YHack at Yale University

The organizers are expecting over 1000 participants and Progress is one of the sponsors of the event.  Representing us will be our esteemed engineers Shelley Chase and Jeremiah Harlan (regretfully I can’t attend). As usual, the event starts late on Friday and hacking will continue until Sunday when the participants will show their hacks and the judges will award prices.

For this event we will encourage participants to use Node.js and MongoDB, Progress® Rollbase® and Rollbase Mobile; I think these technologies are accessible to many of the students attending YHack.

Node.js and Modulus, Rollbase and Mobile

Node.js almost needs no introduction nowadays (see A Case for Node), and Modulus makes deployment and management very easy (check their blog for some handy starting tips).  There are Node.js packages to combine it with pretty much anything – over 102K packages at NPM – plus Modulus comes with its own AddOn marketplace.  The latest addition to our marketplace is Searchly, other popular packages are IronWorker, KeenIO,  IronMQ and SendGrid, and all of these have a free entry level.

Of the other two technologies, Rollbase Mobile is built on Apache Cordova which means you can leverage your HTML5 expertise.  On Rollbase, you will grasp the concept right away if you have used either Force.com or Parse but, if you have not, check out some of our resources or check Keegan’s write-up on one of his summer samples.

Tricks and Treats for App Developers

We have Open Source samples at GitHub that will help you get started with all these technologies.  Check them at github.com/onmodulus and at github.com/progress.   Modulus also has a help center and a great blog.  On Progress check the resource center, the online documentation, the Rollbase Mobile Tutorials, and, if you want to go more in-depth, the sessions from Progress Exchange 2014.  Other useful Progress Products include  Progress OpenEdge, Progress Corticon, Progress Easyl and Progress DataDirect Cloud but these are possibly less accessible to the YHacks participants.

We will bring some Gimbal iBeacons and some Philips Hue for you to play, so perhaps you can try your hand at some IOT hacks, like our summer interns did.  The iBeacons and Philips Hue will be part of our prizes and we will add a couple of the uber-neat BeagleBone Blacks (see my Flicker album). We are still working on the Swag. Up-to-date details of the event, prizes and rules will be available at http://progress.github.io/progress/yhack

See you there!