9 ms·

The most popular APIs and tech at college hackathons

131 points by nealrs 11y ago

nealrs 11y ago
This is Devpost's, (formerly ChallengePost - oh yeah, we also changed our name today), Student Hacker Report. We looked at & ranked project tags from a sample of 13,281 student hackers who participated in 160 student hackathons and submitted 9,898 projects, either in hackathons or on their Devpost portfolios.
yodon 11y ago
Two surprises that caught my eye were Azure beating AWS by more than 30% (416 projects to 307) and Unity3d smoking Unreal (1174 projects to 64 projects)
- nealrs 11y ago
  @yodon - yep, surprised us too at first. But MS had a very strong hackathon sponsorship campaign last season (mentors, prizes, etc.) and that really does move the needle.
- skolor 11y ago
  Its my understanding that Azure is slightly better for students. Their Dreamspark offering, at least when I looked at it, was better if you got started in the first couple years of school.
- adrusi 11y ago
  Microsoft offers prizes at almost every one of these events for teams using Azure. If the team isn't especially invested in one platform or another, the prize availability will decide for them.
  - akhilcacharya 11y ago
    Their prizes are pretty good too. A few friends of mine won specced out Surface Pro 3's for a really crappy Android app.
- Zombieball 11y ago
  I was surprised to see Venmo as top payment API. I guess I am out of the loop as I have never heard of it. I expected to see Stripe at the top of that list.
  - myth_buster 11y ago
    This was what surprised me... I thought the order would have been Stripe, Paypal...
    - nealrs 11y ago
      OP here. IMO, I think the reason Venmo trumps is because it's P2P payments rather than for retail / enterprise. Most of the hacks using Venmo are about tipping your friends or discouraging bad behavior, etc. Plus, Braintree / Venmo are frequent sponsors.
      - briandear 11y ago
        There should be some asterisk or something next to tech that is a frequent sponsor. That influence severely distorts the conclusions. If we're discussion auto racing and Hyundai was giving out free cars, then would that mean that Hyundai was the best race car because everyone was using it? The intent of this study isn't to see how effective contest sponsorship is, it's to get an idea of popular technologies. Sponsorship non-disclosure paints an inaccurate picture. i.e. Azure being so popular when in the real word, it isn't.
        fapjacks 11y ago
        Absolutely this. Sponsorship information completely changes the picture.
- bcohen123 11y ago
  Unity3d is almost certainly leading because of all of the oculus sponsorships.
  - dopamean 11y ago
    I dont know anything about Unity or Unreal but can't you do Unity stuff in JS? Perhaps that has something to do with it too?
  - dfbrown 11y ago
    I think it's more likely because Unity has been targeting the smaller dev market since it began, while Unreal only seriously started targeting that market earlier this year with its free version.
angersock 11y ago
JSON is not a programming language. C'mon, folks. :|
- stefanmielke 11y ago
  Nor are OpenGL, and WebGL, and AJAX, and JSP. And you could include XML and XAML in this if you're being picky.
  - mobiuscog 11y ago
    And number 1 is HTML...
    - rhaps0dy 11y ago
      Welcome to the hackathon scene! Where everyone can be a hacker, even if they do "business development".
      - krrishd 11y ago
        I know this is in (semi)-jest, but I don't think it's a bad thing that technology seems more accessible than it may actually be. I don't think it'd be exactly productive if only the most technically capable people felt like they could even start to enter the industry.
        rhaps0dy 11y ago
        That's not a bad thing. What I don't like (I don't know if it happens in the USA, but here in Barcelona hackathons it often does) is teams submitting just a PowerPoint presentation to the hackathon, and sometimes even winning.
        krrishd 11y ago
        That's a valid concern for sure, I've seen exactly what you're talking about. Interestingly enough though, college hackathons are the only hackathons I've seen actually reward implementation over concept and the actual technical work done by teams over future potential.
caseysoftware 11y ago
This is great data. As a former/recovering evangelist, it's great to see how these things work at a macro level. You always keep track of your own data, hacks, etc but don't have a good idea of what happens at the hackathons you didn't attend or for the APIs - colleagues or competitors - you're not tracking. +1 to ChallengePost/DevPost for sharing all this.
- nealrs 11y ago
  Thanks Keith, our org dashboards are going to even more with this data!
ejcx 11y ago
I'm amazed to see Lua higher than Go, JSP, Scala, and some other stuff students would be more likely to be exposed to. Maybe students are doing a lot of NGINX stuff ? I'm also glad to see PHP high on the list. Good to know it isn't going anywhere anytime soon, especially with all the work FB is putting into it.
- sbov 11y ago
  In general Lua is pretty popular as a scripting language within larger systems, especially games. Also, I don't see percentages anywhere. For all we know by the time it's down to Lua it could be something like 0.5% of all projects.
- patio11 11y ago
  Maybe students are doing a lot of NGINX stuff ? <Wages Of A Misspent Youth>World of Warcraft addons.</Wages Of A Misspent Youth>
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Yup, its the defacto scripiting language for games.
- briandear 11y ago
  Sad to see PHP high on the list, it would be good if it could go away anytime soon. PHP is crap. I am rather surprised to see things like Ember not even making the list in JavaScript frameworks. The Microsoft weighting of this data is also peculiar. But, I suppose universities tend to represent academia as opposed to the cutting edge of the real word. There also seems to be a heavy bias against Ruby compared to the popularity of ruby in the real world.
jasonmcalacanis 11y ago
awesome startup and team.... stoked to have angel invested in this one five years ago and watched them go 100% dev (they used to do all kinds of challenges). lots of great stuff coming as well!
theyCallMeSwift 11y ago
As someone who's spent a lot of time with both developer relations and Hackathons in general, here are my top 5 insights from this analysis. 1. The Major League Hacking hardware lab is HUGE for hardware companies. Top 5 have all been there since day zero. New additional are all rising. http://mlh.io/hardware-lab http://mlh.io/hardware-lab 2. In every API category, the companies with the best developer relations programs are in the top 3 performers, usually #1 and #2. 3. There are big opportunities for companies in the Geo, Music, Database, and Game Engine spaces to win with student hackers. 4. Now is a great time to be in developer event marketing. We're heading for a data revolution no other event marketing industry has. 5. Node.js IS actually the one true dev language (JK)
rgbrgb 11y ago
Though I wish there was more innovation happening in real estate, a part of me is pretty happy to have approximately 0 college students building apps in our vertical. That's the perk of building software only older people care about for an industry where you still have to talk to adults all day to get anything done (luckily I have some great adults on my team who do most of the talking).
gtrubetskoy 11y ago
I'm surprised to see MongoDB as #1 in the db list, is it really now taught at colleges? My favorite article on MongoDB: http://nyeggen.com/post/2013-10-18-the-genius-and-folly-of-mongodb/ http://nyeggen.com/post/2013-10-18-the-genius-and-folly-of-m...
- jameshart 11y ago
  Mongo and MySQL - it's like hackathon participants don't really care about data integrity at all :)
  - blhack 11y ago
    Yeah, I mean it's not like anybody has ever built anything useful with either of those datastores before, amirite?
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      At least nothing with Mongo that hasn't completely imploded into a raging inferno at some point in the project's lifetime. I have never heard of a project using MongoDB that didn't at some point sting the developers with some pain points and make people wish they'd never used it in the first place. I really, really wish it wasn't the case, because I like a lot of MongoDB's design ideas, but from a production standpoint, it's crap.
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  It's not taught at colleges. It's popular for a few reasons - insanely easy to set up with hosted providers, many of which market at hackathons - mongodb markets at a lot of hackathons - many hackathon projects prefer fast-to-write above all else - schemaless is perfect for an environment where iterating quickly is a must and you don't really care about migrating data - works well with node through mongoose, and node is also popular on the hackathon circuit
habosa 11y ago
Very interesting to see how much more popular Android is for hackathons. I imagine it's because you don't need a dev account, easy to deploy to a device/share APKs, and the APIs have fewer limits. But if you ask this same survey of actual startups, most go iOS first for the $$$.
- gotrecruit 11y ago
  and you don't need a mac to develop android apps, so for most people android app is essentially free.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    This has already blocked me. Developed an android app, was asked by several friends to port it to Apple, didn't want to shell out for a Mac. Even the Minis, a popular "get a Mac platform for cheap" choice, are several hundred dollars used.
    - scholia 11y ago
      The latest Mac Mini (2014) I saw had soldered RAM and a slow processor, so older used versions should be even more popular....
    - spathi_fwiffo 11y ago
      I've heard of people running MacOS and XCode from VirtualBox/QEMU/etc. I guess you would have to pay for the Mac OS software to install on the VM, but it would save you on hardware costs.
      - arfar 11y ago
        I didn't think that the OS X license let you run it anywhere other than Apple hardware. That's just something I've heard though, never actually investigated it.
bennader_ 11y ago
This is awesome product
wcummings 11y ago
I "mentored" at hack beanpot in Boston and was totally surprised by how much native mobile development was happening. Nearly every entry was a native mobile app.
erobbins 11y ago
I'm surprised C/C++ was so high and ruby so low. I assume the C/C++ position is due to hardware hackathons mainly.

131 points by nealrs 11y ago

This is Devpost's, (formerly ChallengePost - oh yeah, we also changed our name today), Student Hacker Report. We looked at & ranked project tags from a sample of 13,281 student hackers who participated in 160 student hackathons and submitted 9,898 projects, either in hackathons or on their Devpost portfolios.

yodon 11y ago

Two surprises that caught my eye were Azure beating AWS by more than 30% (416 projects to 307) and Unity3d smoking Unreal (1174 projects to 64 projects)

nealrs 11y ago
@yodon - yep, surprised us too at first. But MS had a very strong hackathon sponsorship campaign last season (mentors, prizes, etc.) and that really does move the needle.
skolor 11y ago
Its my understanding that Azure is slightly better for students. Their Dreamspark offering, at least when I looked at it, was better if you got started in the first couple years of school.
adrusi 11y ago
Microsoft offers prizes at almost every one of these events for teams using Azure. If the team isn't especially invested in one platform or another, the prize availability will decide for them.
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  Their prizes are pretty good too. A few friends of mine won specced out Surface Pro 3's for a really crappy Android app.
Zombieball 11y ago
I was surprised to see Venmo as top payment API. I guess I am out of the loop as I have never heard of it. I expected to see Stripe at the top of that list.
- myth_buster 11y ago
  This was what surprised me... I thought the order would have been Stripe, Paypal...
  - nealrs 11y ago
    OP here. IMO, I think the reason Venmo trumps is because it's P2P payments rather than for retail / enterprise. Most of the hacks using Venmo are about tipping your friends or discouraging bad behavior, etc. Plus, Braintree / Venmo are frequent sponsors.
    - briandear 11y ago
      There should be some asterisk or something next to tech that is a frequent sponsor. That influence severely distorts the conclusions. If we're discussion auto racing and Hyundai was giving out free cars, then would that mean that Hyundai was the best race car because everyone was using it? The intent of this study isn't to see how effective contest sponsorship is, it's to get an idea of popular technologies. Sponsorship non-disclosure paints an inaccurate picture. i.e. Azure being so popular when in the real word, it isn't.
      - fapjacks 11y ago
        Absolutely this. Sponsorship information completely changes the picture.
bcohen123 11y ago
Unity3d is almost certainly leading because of all of the oculus sponsorships.
- dopamean 11y ago
  I dont know anything about Unity or Unreal but can't you do Unity stuff in JS? Perhaps that has something to do with it too?
- dfbrown 11y ago
  I think it's more likely because Unity has been targeting the smaller dev market since it began, while Unreal only seriously started targeting that market earlier this year with its free version.

angersock 11y ago

JSON is not a programming language. C'mon, folks. :|

stefanmielke 11y ago
Nor are OpenGL, and WebGL, and AJAX, and JSP. And you could include XML and XAML in this if you're being picky.
- mobiuscog 11y ago
  And number 1 is HTML...
  - rhaps0dy 11y ago
    Welcome to the hackathon scene! Where everyone can be a hacker, even if they do "business development".
    - krrishd 11y ago
      I know this is in (semi)-jest, but I don't think it's a bad thing that technology seems more accessible than it may actually be. I don't think it'd be exactly productive if only the most technically capable people felt like they could even start to enter the industry.
      - rhaps0dy 11y ago
        That's not a bad thing. What I don't like (I don't know if it happens in the USA, but here in Barcelona hackathons it often does) is teams submitting just a PowerPoint presentation to the hackathon, and sometimes even winning.
        krrishd 11y ago
        That's a valid concern for sure, I've seen exactly what you're talking about. Interestingly enough though, college hackathons are the only hackathons I've seen actually reward implementation over concept and the actual technical work done by teams over future potential.

caseysoftware 11y ago

This is great data. As a former/recovering evangelist, it's great to see how these things work at a macro level. You always keep track of your own data, hacks, etc but don't have a good idea of what happens at the hackathons you didn't attend or for the APIs - colleagues or competitors - you're not tracking. +1 to ChallengePost/DevPost for sharing all this.

nealrs 11y ago
Thanks Keith, our org dashboards are going to even more with this data!

ejcx 11y ago

I'm amazed to see Lua higher than Go, JSP, Scala, and some other stuff students would be more likely to be exposed to. Maybe students are doing a lot of NGINX stuff ? I'm also glad to see PHP high on the list. Good to know it isn't going anywhere anytime soon, especially with all the work FB is putting into it.

sbov 11y ago
In general Lua is pretty popular as a scripting language within larger systems, especially games. Also, I don't see percentages anywhere. For all we know by the time it's down to Lua it could be something like 0.5% of all projects.
patio11 11y ago
Maybe students are doing a lot of NGINX stuff ? <Wages Of A Misspent Youth>World of Warcraft addons.</Wages Of A Misspent Youth>
- vvanders 11y ago
  Yup, its the defacto scripiting language for games.
briandear 11y ago
Sad to see PHP high on the list, it would be good if it could go away anytime soon. PHP is crap. I am rather surprised to see things like Ember not even making the list in JavaScript frameworks. The Microsoft weighting of this data is also peculiar. But, I suppose universities tend to represent academia as opposed to the cutting edge of the real word. There also seems to be a heavy bias against Ruby compared to the popularity of ruby in the real world.

jasonmcalacanis 11y ago

awesome startup and team.... stoked to have angel invested in this one five years ago and watched them go 100% dev (they used to do all kinds of challenges). lots of great stuff coming as well!

theyCallMeSwift 11y ago

As someone who's spent a lot of time with both developer relations and Hackathons in general, here are my top 5 insights from this analysis. 1. The Major League Hacking hardware lab is HUGE for hardware companies. Top 5 have all been there since day zero. New additional are all rising. http://mlh.io/hardware-lab http://mlh.io/hardware-lab 2. In every API category, the companies with the best developer relations programs are in the top 3 performers, usually #1 and #2. 3. There are big opportunities for companies in the Geo, Music, Database, and Game Engine spaces to win with student hackers. 4. Now is a great time to be in developer event marketing. We're heading for a data revolution no other event marketing industry has. 5. Node.js IS actually the one true dev language (JK)

rgbrgb 11y ago

Though I wish there was more innovation happening in real estate, a part of me is pretty happy to have approximately 0 college students building apps in our vertical. That's the perk of building software only older people care about for an industry where you still have to talk to adults all day to get anything done (luckily I have some great adults on my team who do most of the talking).

gtrubetskoy 11y ago

I'm surprised to see MongoDB as #1 in the db list, is it really now taught at colleges? My favorite article on MongoDB: http://nyeggen.com/post/2013-10-18-the-genius-and-folly-of-mongodb/ http://nyeggen.com/post/2013-10-18-the-genius-and-folly-of-m...

jameshart 11y ago
Mongo and MySQL - it's like hackathon participants don't really care about data integrity at all :)
- blhack 11y ago
  Yeah, I mean it's not like anybody has ever built anything useful with either of those datastores before, amirite?
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    At least nothing with Mongo that hasn't completely imploded into a raging inferno at some point in the project's lifetime. I have never heard of a project using MongoDB that didn't at some point sting the developers with some pain points and make people wish they'd never used it in the first place. I really, really wish it wasn't the case, because I like a lot of MongoDB's design ideas, but from a production standpoint, it's crap.
akhilcacharya 11y ago
It's not taught at colleges. It's popular for a few reasons - insanely easy to set up with hosted providers, many of which market at hackathons - mongodb markets at a lot of hackathons - many hackathon projects prefer fast-to-write above all else - schemaless is perfect for an environment where iterating quickly is a must and you don't really care about migrating data - works well with node through mongoose, and node is also popular on the hackathon circuit

habosa 11y ago

Very interesting to see how much more popular Android is for hackathons. I imagine it's because you don't need a dev account, easy to deploy to a device/share APKs, and the APIs have fewer limits. But if you ask this same survey of actual startups, most go iOS first for the $$$.

gotrecruit 11y ago
and you don't need a mac to develop android apps, so for most people android app is essentially free.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  This has already blocked me. Developed an android app, was asked by several friends to port it to Apple, didn't want to shell out for a Mac. Even the Minis, a popular "get a Mac platform for cheap" choice, are several hundred dollars used.
  - scholia 11y ago
    The latest Mac Mini (2014) I saw had soldered RAM and a slow processor, so older used versions should be even more popular....
  - spathi_fwiffo 11y ago
    I've heard of people running MacOS and XCode from VirtualBox/QEMU/etc. I guess you would have to pay for the Mac OS software to install on the VM, but it would save you on hardware costs.
    - arfar 11y ago
      I didn't think that the OS X license let you run it anywhere other than Apple hardware. That's just something I've heard though, never actually investigated it.

bennader_ 11y ago

This is awesome product

wcummings 11y ago

I "mentored" at hack beanpot in Boston and was totally surprised by how much native mobile development was happening. Nearly every entry was a native mobile app.

erobbins 11y ago

I'm surprised C/C++ was so high and ruby so low. I assume the C/C++ position is due to hardware hackathons mainly.