Paypal Charity Hack 09
Tim was at Paypals’ Charity Hack over the weekend and was on the team that won the overall prize meaning he will be taking a short plane journey to the US to join over developers at Paypal X Innovate Conference. While Hackdays are becoming quite common in the UK this is the first one aimed at supporting charities and attracted a more diverse mix then a normal hackday.
Photo by cyberdees
The winning hack a mechanism to assign how money peoples charitable donation is spent through the use of First Person Shooter caused much amusement amongst fellow hackers and clearly went down well with the judges. The game itself also went down well with all, as while the dev team were sleeping other hackers had joined the server and continued to play through out the night validating the concept.
Photo by cyberdees
The weekend did not go completely without a hitch however as Tim did manage to lose his charger for his netbook but after an impassioned appeal a spare was found and the hacking continued.
The whole weekend was fantastic and huge thankyou have to go to Paypal who brought some of the new API development team over from the states to visit and in particular John, Alison and Dees for making it happen. The winning team consisted of Tim, Dom, Kevin, Leeky and Tom but our beta testers knocked up an impressive 600+ kills in just 3 hours.
