HackVAN, Vancouver’s big API hackday, takes place this Saturday! If you have any skill or interest in writing apps that make use of publicly available APIs or have ideas on how to turn APIs into applications, you should come down and participate! Here are the quick details:
- When: Saturday, August 20th, 2011, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
- Where: Mozilla’s Vancouver offices (163 West Hastings Street, Suite 200, Vancouver BC)
- How much? A mere $10 for developers to attend.
- Will I get fed? We’re providing breakfast and lunch.
- How do I register? Visit the HackVAN registration site.
The APIses
The HackVAN organizers have rounded up a number of APIs that you can use at HackVAN. The idea is to write an application that uses at least one of these APIs and have it working by the end of the day. David Underwood (Developer Advocate) and Yours Truly (Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist) will be there as representatives of Shopify and the Shopify API.
If you’d like to find out more about the Shopify API, check out our API documentation. It’s a RESTful (or as I like to say, “RESTafarian”) API and quite easy to use. I also wrote a series of articles on getting started with the API:
- Part 1: Getting started – What are Shopify apps, and how do I get started with the API?
- Part 2: Exploring the API – A quick look at what you can do and a primer on REST
- Part 3: More exploration – Getting information about items in a shop, and adding new ones
- Part 4: Change is good – Modifying items in a shop
- Part 5: Deleting items
If you want to see what’s possible with the Shopify API, take a look at our App Store, where developers who’ve built Shopify apps can sell them and where Shopify shopowners can buy and install them, extending the capabilities of their shops.
Ours isn’t the only HackVAN API. Our API buddies include:
- Context.io: An email API that makes it possible to capture conversations, collaborations and document exchanges in the flow of email so you can harness them for CRM, project managements and other activities where email is the “paper trail”. Here’s their API.
- Freshbooks: If you’re a consultant, indie or small business that provides services and bills people for them, Freshbooks makes sending those bills easy. Here’s their API, and here are some implementation examples.
- Idee: Best described in three words — awesome image search. They’re providing two APIs: Piximilar, a search-by-color API, and PixMatch, a search-for-similar-images API.
- Twilio: Great for building voice- and text-messaging-based apps. Here are their APIs, and here’s their API project gallery.
- YellowAPI: Local search for Canadian businesses and other things. Great for those “where’s the nearest X?” apps. Here’s their API.
The Prizes
Write an app that we deem worthy and you could win of these:
First prize is a MacBook Air. 11″ diagonally, really skinny, 1.6GHz dual-core Intel i5 Processor, 4 GB RAM, and 128GB mass storage. It’s an amazing and incredibly portable development machine. My friend Andrew Burke uses this as his main machine, where he does Rails and iOS development on it.
Second prize: iPad 2. The 16GB WiFi model. My iPad is my “second screen”, notetaking device, ebook reader and favorite portable gaming machine. This one’s being provided by Shopify.
Third prize: Amazon Kindle 3G. Free 3G, built-in wifi and space for 3,500 books.
And there will be more prizes, too! If you want a shot at these prizes, come on down on Saturday and participate in HackVAN — register now!