PlymHack2018

The event was a great success, you can read our Facebook post. We hope to host another PlymHack next year, hopefully we will see everyone then!

PlymHack 2018 is a Hackathon hosted by the Computer Society at the University of Plymouth. This will be CompSoc's first Hackathon working as a society.

PlymHack will be on 21st April 2018 from 12:30 (noon) to 11:00pm.

PlymHack will be located on University of Plymouth Campus in Davy Main Hall.

Make sure you RSVP on our "Splash That" PlymHack page so we know you intend to join in on this event.

Registration will also be available on this before entering the Davy Main Hall, please make sure you know or bring along your Student Reference Number/Student ID.

Our Computer Society Facebook page will be updated with more information as the event nears and along with it any changes to the event.

Just make sure you bring along your laptop and power cable.

Some smaller things to do (optional, our speakers will also discuss this):

• Join GitHub if you haven't so already,
• Register for the GitHub Education Student Developer Pack; some of the tools may be helpful for you.

Other than that come along on the day and enjoy working with others to develop something fun or creative.

It is up to you what you want to make and we will provide resources for those who are new to Hackathons to get started.

For our first Hackathon we have opened it up so you can either create what you want or teach yourself a new programming language/framework. This way we will not trying to make you create a big project within the time but allow you to explore new possibilities.

As shown on our Splash That page the brief outline for the day is as below:

12.30pm (noon) - Gather & Get Ready; Meet in Davy Main Hall, and get ready to build!

1.00pm - 1.30pm - Introduction; Get some essential tips to help build out your project during the event.

2.00pm - Lewis Smallwood & Git/GitHub Talk; Our Industry Outreach Officer will be presenting on how to use version control in your projects and will help you understand the fundamentals of Git and how to make use of it with GitHub.

3.00pm - Break/Relax; In this period will be playing some light-hearted activities i.e. party games/musical chairs etc.

4.00pm - Elixel & Glitch Platform; Christian Cook from Elixel will be introducing their Glitch Platform.

6.00pm - Dinner; provided in the form of Pizza (kindly sponsored by the BCS). Grab some food, socialise, and keep hacking!

8.00pm - Break/Relax; We will spend this time as a small break for everyone, after this will be the final push.

11.00pm - Show & Tell; Time to show-off all of that hard work you just put in to the other hackers (you can present if you would like to). You will also be able to upload your project to the PlymHack2018 repository following the presentations on Git/GitHub! 😃

This repository will serve as a hub for resources you may utilise for this hackathon. We will be uploading useful tutorials if you want to get started on you projects and any project's you finish at the end of the hackathon can be uploaded here to the repository for your Show & Tell! 😃

As well as this, this repository will always be here after the hackathon with resources if you want to explore further.

During the hackathon, there will small activities to take part in i.e. cup-stacking or small team problem solving to relax for a while. As well as this we have a small Git workshop delivered by our GitHub Campus Expert Lewis Smallwood.

He will cover how to get Git command-line and Desktop up and running on your system and will cover the basics of source control with Git e.g. creating and linking repositories, adding files to commit and pushing those commits to your repository along with merge/pull to/from repositories.

If you want to start building software and want to try a new language or development framework then the following resources introduce you to Atom and Electron (a customisable editor and a development framework). With these tools you can start exploring the Node.js language:

• Create your First Atom Plugin (on YouTube)

• Get up and running with Electron (on YouTube)

If you are interested in making your own personal webpage then a free tool provided by GitHub is that of GitHub Pages & Jekyll, you can follow the video below to get started:

• GitHub Pages & Jekyll (on YouTube)

The aforementioned tutorials and guides were provided from Major League Hacking (MLH) Local Hackday.

The list below links to resources which you may find interesting, following the talk given on Git by Lewis. If you want to learn further with the help of GitHub then the videos created by GitHub are a great place to continue with source control:

• Intro to GitHub (video)

• Quick Start guide to GitHub (video)

• GitHub for Beginners (from GitHub) (video)

• Managing your projects in GitHub (video)

• GitHub and Atom IO (video)

• GitHub and Visual Studio (video)

• Introduction to GitHub (On-Demand course)

• GitHub Command-line (On-Demand course)

All the videos were listed on GitHub's webcasts library and courses can be found at GitHub On-Demand courses.

Christian Cook will be our guest speaker for today talking about Elixel's Glitch Platform. He will be in at 4.00pm to present to us, this will be after our lunch break.