Pebble at Pearl Hacks

Last weekend, we were so excited to watch a new group of Pebble Developers blossom. Pearl Hacks, an all women’s hackathon hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, served as an incubator for a class of young women who are a testament to the diversity of backgrounds represented by the Pebble Developer community.

Were these women seasoned hackers? Nope, 60% of them had never been to a hackathon before, and the majority of the attendees had been programming for less than a year! Regardless of their previous technical experience, they created spectacular projects, and we were so impressed by their practical, useful hacks. When we started our workshop to help first time developers get started with Pebble, we had no idea just how many projects would be created over the course of the weekend! Only 4 people in the room of about 40 people had ever heard of Pebble before but in just 24 hours we had 15 teams create Pebble projects!

The most outstanding Pebble hack was awarded to Pebble Pane a Pebble app that allows you to customize your computer screen for different activities. For example, if you want to be in “coding mode,” pressing the select button on your Pebble signals your computer to run an AppleScript that in turn opens applications (such as Sublime and Spotify) and fits them to predefined window size and locations. We all agreed that this was an app we would personally use, and were so impressed by the group’s ability to overcome multiple challenges during the hacking process.

Our second best Pebble hack is sure to excite our League of Legends fans: League Streams Watchapp allows Pebblers to see the top 5 League streamers on Twitch in their vicinity. League Streams was ready for publishing by the Demo Fair, and we’re sure that it will be avidly used as soon as it hits the Pebble appstore.

From the high school students who used our SDK to learn C and wrote an app in under 24 hours, to the Chemical Engineering PhD student who learned JavaScript to integrate her website with her Pebble app, this weekend truly proved that anyone can be an exceptional Pebble Developer. No matter your prior experience, we encourage you to check out our guides and documentation online. Don’t be shy about asking for help: we can’t wait to see what you create!

Pebblers in Los Angeles or the College Park, Maryland area - we’re coming to you very soon! We’ll be at LA Hacks from April 3rd-5th and Bitcamp from April 10th-12th, and we’d love to see you. Stop by our table and come hang out! Check out our events page for more information about where we’ll be in the upcoming months.

Have you created an app at a hackathon but haven't submitted it to the appstore yet? We would love for you to show your app to the world! Head over to the Developer Portal to get started.

Much love from our team and we'll see you at the next event!