A mini-hackathon for developers in the media industry, helping you build apps and deploy them quickly on the Heroku platform.

Your challenge as a team is to create a web application that shows off what can be achieved in a small space of time.  The choice of application will be down to those at the event, so bring your ideas and enthusiasm along.

Help and advice will be on hand by experts from Heroku and Tquila.  As we are also at 10Gen, we may even have a few MongoDB experts.

Rough schedule

6.00pm - Socialise over pizza and discuss ideas for the hack
6.45pm - Get into groups and start hacking & deploying
8.45pm - Final show and tell

Anatomy of the mini-hackathon

The mini-hackathon will consist of small teams working together to build their web application and deploy them to heroku as a live website.  The applications can solve any challenge related to the media industry.  At the end of the event, teams will discuss their experiences and what they want to try next.

Advice is on hand to help you on getting the most out of using Github & Heroku as part of your build & deployment process.

The mini-hackathon session will include:

Practical, hands-on development on Heroku using any supported language First hand experience from other developers in industry Share techniques and experiences over drinks and food  

About Heroku

Heroku provides a platform as a service (PaaS) for building, deploying and running application in the cloud.  Languages directly supported by Heroku include Ruby, Node.js, Java, Python, Clojure and Scala.  Customer examples of Heroku use can be seen at http://success.heroku.com/.

Before the hackathon

Ensure you have a git client (http://git-scm.com/), at least one person in the team will need to commit their code to Github.

If you are new to using the Git version control system, get a free Github account and take the 15 minute github tutorial at  http://try.github.com/

To deploy your application to Heroku, you will need an Heroku account and have installed the Heroku toolbelt (toolbelt.heroku.com).  This can also be done at the event and is only required by one team member.