At the fifth annual TimesOpen Hack Day hosted by The New York Times Developers, people from around the city came to hack with us and our API and platform partners CartoDB, Enigma and Google. For most attendees, it was their first-ever hack event.
Here are some highlights from the day:
Contrarian by Justin Sung and Chuck Pierce
(Best in Show)
This Chrome extension searches for New York Times articles similar to the one being read and opens a new tab of stories with opposing views on the same topic.
The Know York Times Quiz by Ofer Bronstein, Benjamin Conant, Hugo Marcotte, Faisal Nawaz and Griffin Telljohann
(Best Use of a New York Times API)
Inspired by a New York Times weekly news quiz, the team created a web app to generate quizzes automatically, based on stories in The Times.
Georgie St. Claire by Lindsay Levine and Sam McCord and Sphynx by Nathan Epstein, Jeffrey Klaus, Gabriel Lebec, Christian Sakai and Oddur Sigurdsson
(Tied for People’s Choice)
Georgie St. Claire is a Twitter bot newsreader and entertainment experience incorporating the New York Times Article Search API. Sphynx linked a visualization platform to an Oculus Rift to show code and graphs in 3-D space.
Reddnyt by Alastair Coote
Reddnyt applies Reddit’s ranking algorithm to New York Times articles shared on Facebook and Twitter. It was created by a developer at The New York Times. It’s best viewed on a mobile device.
Perooz by Sneha Inguva and MD Islam
The team working on Perooz showed off a Chrome extension for annotating and commenting on reporting, source development and crowdsourced information.
Newstips by Nicole Dominguez, Daniel Gonzalez, Stefan Huynh, Matt Nelson and James Walker
Making the most of crowdsourced information can be a challenge when there’s a lot of material coming in. Newstips gives users an interface for leaving a tip that includes geolocation, making it easy for reporters or other end users to find and sort tips by place.
Thanks to all of our 2014 Hack Day participants. For more from TimesOpen, check out slides and other material from earlier events on transitioning to continuous delivery and reactive programming and join us in 2015. Sign up for announcements at http://developers.nytimes.com/events/newsletter/.