To celebrate New Years, and also an extra few days off from client work, we had our own internal hackathon Jan 2-3.
The Rules
- Work on anything you want that will somehow add value to the company, the team, or our customers.
- Work in teams if you want.
- Crank out something cool. Its also a chance to do something different that you wouldn’t normally do every day.
- Show off your hard work at 3:30pm on Jan 3rd to the team.
There were a lot of projects being worked on during the 48 hours. Corrigan built a new XMPP service for an AngularJS project we’re working on; Seth and Cookfair created some new original art for some upcoming portfolio pieces, Richard and Erik cranked out some features for a client, and Clarke targeted some new customers. For my part, Clay and Kirk were looking for something to hack on as well so we partnered up on LeagueBook.
The Idea
It wasn’t even ours to begin with. Kirk came across a reddit post explaining how it would be pretty sweet if there was a simple website for LoL players still in school to show their Summoner Name alongside their college or university. With that information players could find other players in their school and see how they rank not only within their own school, but how their school as a whole ranks against others in the country.
The Tech
We build some pretty extensive service APIs everyday using NodeJS, so we decided to keep things simple and use something we were already familiar with. We used:
- Node.js, with Express.js as the web framework
- Postgres
- Data sourced from Pulling data from the official Riot API with a handy open source module from NPM
- Themed with Bootstrap
- Hosted on a free Heroku account (so blame them if it’s down)
The Result
LeagueBook.org was born! After about an hour on Reddit we have 24 players representing 23 schools. If there’s interest from the community, we’ll continue to add to the project. We have a bunch more ideas we want to roll out in the future, but its not too shabby for a 2-day hackathon. We were even able to sleep at night between the 2 days and not pull an all nighter.
So if you play League of Legends in the NA region, have a .edu school email address you should enroll now!