This last Saturday we hosted an Enyo hackathon in our offices in Sunnyvale, CA. Over seventy people turned up to participate in a day of learning, experimentation and prizes. Following presentations by Enda McGrath and Gray Norton were presentations by community members Ryan Rix and Hal Saville.

We were fortunate to have three extra sponsors at the event: Filepicker.io, PhoneGap and Firebase. Each sponsor addressed the crowds to explain how their offerings tied with Enyo to allow for richer and more compelling apps. Attendees were invited to integrate the various products with Enyo for chances at additional prizes.

Hackathons can be a great way to learn new skills and the Enyo hackathon was no exception. In attendance were programmers ranging from Enyo gurus to JavaScript newbies. The experienced Enyo developers rolled up their sleeves and got to work following the presentations. Those who wanted to learn about Enyo attended ‘Enyo 101’ sessions and quickly came up to speed. With the addition of our sponsors’ tools and the core Enyo team in attendance, everyone walked away with new knowledge.

While many folks worked on creating new applications with Enyo, several folks also contributed to Enyo itself. Throughout the day, a ringing bell indicated an accepted ‘pull request’ to Enyo and attendees who submitted those changes received Enyo patches for their efforts.

The first prize of the evening was for a command-line tool to generate and test Enyo projects. Blaine Bublitz of Iced Dev created a tool that makes setting up Enyo projects a snap. For his efforts Blaine took away a Nexus 7.

The next prize winner was David Jensen, who won an iPad for his great-looking social wine app which combined the wine.com API with Firebase. Next, Yewon Lee won a set of Beats Audio headphones for his color matching game, which also used Firebase for data storage.

Filepicker.io awarded their prize to Aaron Borden for his app which digitally signed images. The Firebase prize was awarded to Guy Ziv for his “I Spy” game — a game which challenged players to take a photograph which most closely matched a supplied image. The PhoneGap prize went to Siva Ramanathan for his contributions to Enyo’s Bootplate to improve compatibility between Enyo and PhoneGap on Windows Phone.

All other presenters were awarded with gift cards. For everyone else, the prize was taking home knowledge about Enyo and the memories of a day filled with hacking, pizza and friendship. What more could you ask for?

Don’t worry if you missed out on this event, we will be hosting more Enyo hackathons in the near future. Perhaps the next one will be closer to you!