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The most popular technology for hackathons

| Sieuwert van Otterloo | Agile

Devpost, a company supporting many US hackathons, has just released nsights into the technologies used by teams in their hackathons. The report is interesting reading for anyone involved into technology decisions. It shows which languages are popular, easy to use and suitable for fast development.

In a hackathon, teams have one day or one weekend to develop one of their ideas is a working application. Teams have little time but a lot of freedom: they can choose any technology they want. New participants typically choose either languages they already know, or new technologies they wanted to try out but could not use in their professional life before. Experienced participants of course choose technologies that simply work for rapid development. Either way, seeing a language used in a hackathon is a good sign for the ‘health’ of that language.

Devpost has published a series of statistics based on 9898 projects, made by 13281 students in the past 12 months (the 2014-2015 academic year). For each project, they looked at several aspects. We list the most important ones: programming languages, interfaces to external systems, databases and hardware used.

Popular programming languages

devpost-programming-languages

Leaving out HTML (mandatory for web development) the results are surprisingly mixed. Javascript is a very modern and popular languages. Python is an older scripting languages but still popular (it has good libraries and works on arduino).  All other main languages are also featured.

Popular APIs

devpost-api

Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow programs to interface with all kinds of devices and to use all kinds of services. Using this APIs one can make APIs that send messages, post for you on social networks or accept payments. With the GEO APIs one can create new maps. (the app frameworks does not really belong here but is added as an extra).

Hardware devices

In many hackathons, people use special hardware to create a real world experience instead of just a website. A lot of open hardware has been created that can be programmed easily. The table below shows the top hardware platforms and devices.

devpost-hardware

Arduino is in essence a PC on a chip and suitable for making almost anything. It is not surprising that this one is most popular. Other devices are more specific: Myo is a gesture recognition armband, and Pebble is a smartwatch. It is nice to see that google cardboard, a $2 device, is much more popular than google glass.

Databases

devpost-databases

An important aspect of any architecture is the database. Most commercial systems use a standard database based on SQL. Many newer, so-called no-SQL databases however exist. Participants in hackathons indeed use the no-SQL database mongoDB very often, and also FoundationDB. The other three databases in the top 5 databases are normal SQL databases: apparently for databases, people choose what they know.

Infrastructure platforms

devpost-paas-iaasFinally there is a top ten of infrastructure as a service providers. If you are doing a one weekend project, it makes sense to rent computer power as needed and not bring your own server. Normally when you choose a platform as a company, you are most worried about the cost per transaction. For a hackathon this is of course different: speed of setup and easy of use are most important.   However we suspect that many of the platforms in the list, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon web Services and IBM Bluemix are also major sponsors of many hackathons and are giving away free access so that developers get to know their platform.

Devpost has many other interesting statistics, and also has example projects behind every listed technology. For more information we recommend you visit the depots website for the full report.

If you are in the process of design a new system or replacing an older system, we can help you select the right technologies. With ICT Institute we have deeper insight into the pros and cons of many old and new technologies, and are happy to give you further advice.

 

 

Author: Sieuwert van Otterloo
Dr. Sieuwert van Otterloo is a court-certified IT expert with interests in agile, security, software research and IT-contracts.