After a successful XHacknight in February this year.We, the XHackers received a bunch of requests to conduct one more XHacknight. This time we teamed up with IBM Bluemix team here in Bangalore to organise a cross-platform mobile hackathon on September 5th and 6th, 2015.

It all started a month ago when we decided to start our next hackathon journey by designing the Xhacknight Website. A website which provides every piece of information that a mobile developer expects. We also started building Xamarin code samples using Bluemix services as backend.

After days of planning and nights of coding the samples, the XHacknight begins at 10:05 on 5th of september with Welcome note by Vidyasagar, an IBMer and XHacker.

XHacknight begins!! #Xamarin #Bluemix pic.twitter.com/aLMjOZjCDW

— Nish (@nishanil) September 5, 2015

Followed by

• Keynote by Naveen Gupta, Head – Asia pacific Mobility group, IBM.
• ReImagine by Ajay Chebbi, MobileFirst team, IBM.

re.imagine with @ajaychebbi at XHacknight #xamarin #bluemix pic.twitter.com/pnrkhLCqTH

— XHackers (@XHackersco) September 5, 2015

• Introduction to Bluemix by Rajesh Jeyapaul, Bluemix team, IBM.
  

  Rajesh with interesting interactive #bluemix talk #xamarin @iyernil @RiyaMRoy @karthik_padman pic.twitter.com/Egchbsktz9

  — Deepak Rai (@itsdeepakrai) September 5, 2015

• Developing Cross platform mobile apps using Xamarin by Nishanth Anil, Developer Evangelist, Xamarin.

@nishanil on stage speaking about #Xamarin. #bluemix pic.twitter.com/cEOMGMv8pz

— Vidyasagar (@VidyasagarMSC) September 5, 2015

• All About XHackNight by Vidyasagar, Developer Evangelist at IBM and a proud XHacker explained what’s Xhacknight, the Rules & Code of conduct and Hack Challenges including an IoT challenge.

At 13:00 on September 5th, it’s time to keep calm and Just code.

100+ participants not even one moved after the training sessions. We asked participants to pitch their ideas and there were some awesome ideas waiting to be transformed into apps.

Our Xamarin experts Prashant and Anubhav were present to help the participants and guide them all along.

At 19:00 on September 5th, participants were eager to learn more about Xamarin.Forms and our Xamarin Evangelist Nish Anil was right there for a quick session on Xamarin.forms.

At 21:00 on September 5th, just mins after dinner, participants wanted to know more info about IBM Cloudant,a NoSQL database-as-a-service. Ajay Chebbi from IBM took a quick session and demoed how to use IBM cloudant.

At 00:15 on September 6th, to break the monotony of coding, It’s webinar time and who can be better than Mayur Tendulkar, Xamarin Evangelist live from Pune spoke about “Tools for Mobile Development” and participants just loved it.

@mayur_tendulkar live from Pune talking about tools to use for #xamarin for audience of #bluemix #xhacknight

— R Pooran Prasad (@pooran) September 5, 2015

At 04:00 AM on September 6th, More than 50% of participants were still awake and coding. There was eagerness all around to LEARN, HACK and WIN.

At 09:00 AM on September 6th, The mobile apps were taking good shape with Xamarin as front-end and IBM Bluemix as backend.

I am seeing some exciting hacks being built with #bluemix #iot foundation and #ibmcloudant and #xamarin app

— Ajay Chebbi (@ajaychebbi) September 6, 2015

At 15:00 on September 6th, The countdown begins !!!

Wohoo 17minutes to go to see the innovative app ideas resulted from overnight hack! #superexcited #Bluemix #Xamarin pic.twitter.com/JNl04FcpDD

— Riya Mary Roy (@RiyaMRoy) September 6, 2015

At 16:00, it’s judging time and the panel were all pumped up to listen to the ideas and judge the mobile apps.

And the judging begins at #XHackNight!!! #bluemix #xamarin

— XHackers (@XHackersco) September 6, 2015

13 teams presented their apps and ideas and the judges were blown away with their potential.

It’s award presentation time,

3rd prize – FitBit Charge goes to CodeJunkie for an awesome IoT mobile app which pulls temperature info from Raspberry Pi 2 and tweets the same through IBM Bluemix.

#CodeJunkie won the 3rd Prize!!! Woot #xamarin #bluemix pic.twitter.com/89rjFcb1Wd

— XHackers (@XHackersco) September 6, 2015

2nd Prize – OnePlus One goes to Team HashKnights for their Blindsist Xamarin.Android and Xamarin Windows phone app which extensively used IBM Watson Visual recognition and Text to speech services to help Blind people.

1st Prize – iPad Mini to Team Match.AI for their Xamarin app which uses IBM watson Personality insights service to match your facebook friends personalities with your personality.

And the team to win First Prize is #Match.AI. Woot!!! #xamarin #bluemix pic.twitter.com/ZwTAGEsJu9

— XHackers (@XHackersco) September 6, 2015

We considered two teams as special mentions for their ideas and efforts. We even honored women participants who stayed till the last min of the Hack.

We specially thank our venue partner IKP Eden, Bangalore for their space and support.

We thank all our sponsors and Support staff for helping in running the Xhacknight.

Our special thanks to Rajesh, Riya and other IBMers for making this event so successful.

Closing notes :

What an awesome event it was. Thanks to each one you for making it such a successful event. 100+ XHackers, 24+ hours of coding, 3+ hours of training and unlimited memories. Without your participation and support, this wouldn’t be possible.

For us, each and every one of you is a WINNER. The efforts you have put, the determination and enthusiasm you have shown is unmatchable. We would love to see your ideas transformed into an app and pushed to the respective stores.

Next steps:
Push all the wonderful photographs taken at the event to our Meetup page.

We would love to hear from you – Provide us your valuable feedback and words of appreciation by writing a blog post on your own blog. Publish the post link on our XHackers FB page.

See you soon and Happy Coding !!!!