Won the Yahoo! Hackday, thanks to Flex :)

February 15, 2009

Just back from the Yahoo! Open Hackday India. It was 2 days of mayhem, hardcore coding and fun.I teamed up with Harish for the event and was looking forward to having some fun…

Since I was a speaker at the last HackDay, I knew that it was 24 hrs of hacking and then a 90 seconds elevator pitch at the end of it. Me and Harish decided to make a hack in an improved version of colrful. It integrated Color Search on Flickr, Photos based on reverse geo-coding, Boss Image Search and more… We were really excited.

Once we started hacking, I had a crazy idea. Why don’t we build an application in 90 seconds. An on-stage demo that would be fun and show the power of Flex. We built a fully functional Boss Image Search Application in 90 seconds. What’s awesome is that its just 13 lines of code. We used a HTTPService to connect to the Boss Image Search service and bound the results to the display shelf. We even managed to implement pagination and applied a Yahoo! Flex Skin to it.

When we went on stage and started coding, I made some mistakes in coding it up. There was a confusion about the timer and we actually finished just as the 90 seconds bell rang out… The crowd was cheering us and the adrenaline rush was really awesome. You get the code below.

Source

and here’s what it resulted in:

Though we did not win for colrful, we won the prize in the Best “Gone in 90 seconds” category and won an iPod Touch. It was really the power of Flex that made this crazy idea possible. I am proud that I am the Flex Evangelist. Go Flex!