Anvil Hack 2015
Anvil Hack 2015 was my first hackathon. Hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, my team and I left Nottingham at 6am to make it for the 10AM start, alongside two other Nottingham Teams. Upon arriving, the various prizes and categories were announced. We decided to tackle the "best Pebble smartwatch application". After some deliberation, we decided to make a dice rolling application that could roll any number of dice with any number of sides, defined by the user. Using the smartwatch's buttons or the android app to set up the roll, the watch would then generate the random number as the user shook their wrist as if rolling dice. The app also implemented a macro parser similar to/inspired by roll20.net in which a user can define, using certain syntax, many types of complicated dice roll used in tabletop gaming (e.g. if 10 six sided dice are rolled, how many have a result greater than 4?).
This was my first experience using an API and it taught me a lot about programming in general. We ended up winning with our idea as the panel of judges all played role playing games and loved the idea! The execution was fairly mediocre, in hindsight, but with a bit of work, it could have been a very useful application for the right kind of person. Unfortunately, I cannot find the sourcecode for the android app. The app that runs on the smartphone was hosted on GitHub and can be reached below.