October is upon us… and along with pumpkin spice lattes (or pumpkin beer) I’m seeing a lot of buzz around upcoming hack events in the dev world! Such as Hacktoberfest, API World Hackathon, and the launch of the 2021 Major League Hacking season. Just like Octoberfest wouldn’t be complete without your favorite pretzel necklace, a great hack project needs something special. A user-friendly, lightweight database enabling rapid app development could be the pretzel necklace to any project. Hackathons have been around for a while now. While we can’t say for sure the exact origin date, most folks attribute the first hack party to a team of 10 developers meeting in Canada in June of 1999 to avoid legal problems with exports of cryptographic software in the US.

Hackathons have exploded worldwide ever since that fateful day in 1999 into something that can help companies or small teams develop products and use cases quicker while recruiting tech talent and scoping out locations for new innovation. These events also give developers the chance to practice and polish their skills, helping them to become better candidates for software engineer positions.

Fast forward to 2020 and communities like Dev.to and Digital Ocean are hosting awesome events like Hacktoberfest, encouraging further inclusion and education in the developer space. Why not make a database, and specifically when I say database, I mean HarperDB 😉 the pretzel necklace to your upcoming hack project?

Lay a Strong Foundation Quickly and Easily

Raise your hand if you have a hard time STARTING a new project, but then once you’re in it and find your groove you can’t STOP working? HarperDB enables developers to spin up a database within minutes, just watch our friend Cassidy Williams build the beginning of a React application on top of HarperDB in under an hour! Similar to pretzels being an easy way to avoid long lines at food booths at beer festivals, HarperDB is the easy way to get your project started and avoid project paralysis. The pretzels also keep you from getting too tipsy at your favorite beer festival, and you could say HarperDB will keep your project from getting too drunk with complications (REACHING….I know).

Why HarperDB Might be a Good Fit for Your Hack Project

• User friendly, built for developers of any skill level
• Flexible & lightweight, SQL & NoSQL, runs anywhere
• REST API
• Sleek Management Studio, limited database configuration required
• Language agnostic
• Marketplace with open source extensions enabling quick & easy development

HarperDB provides you with a few different features to make app development quick and painless. Our API is a single endpoint and ALL database operations are available via the API. Because of this, HarperDB is language agnostic so don’t fret about learning any proprietary languages when you only have one month to build your hack project. Our Management Studio is intuitive and user friendly so you can easily monitor and make changes to your instance(s), fully equipped with all the resources you need like code examples and video tutorials! We have a marketplace where you can find connectors and SDKs to help you get up and running even faster, while expanding upon the features and functionality of HarperDB. Think of the marketplace as the variety of snacks you can add to your pretzel necklace to make it even more delicious and efficient while keeping your hunger at bay. (You’ll see below a picture of a guy who added a LUNCHABLE, that's right an entire Lunchable, to his necklace).

Find Inspiration from Other Pretzel Necklaces

…Or in this case other developer examples. HarperDB has hosted two hackathons in the past and we’ve had excellent and talented hackers build cool stuff on top of HarperDB. Killer inspiration could be the thing that takes your next hack project to the next level. You could keep it easy and build off this simple telemetry monitor or try out building the next addictive game app like Connect 4 Linguals. Or, check out this Sample Programs repo on GitHub for a fun side project.

The winner of our first hackathon created a secure healthcare portal that would eliminate data silos that currently exist across different providers and doctors for one patient. Key stakeholders including your various doctors, family members, nurses, mental health therapists, and even fitness instructors or nutritionists, don’t have a way to communicate. If you’re looking for inspiration, use this common problem of data silos to launch your project and find a solution for integrating data for something that is important to you. Everyone loves examples and HarperDB has quite a few. (By the way check out some pictures of my favorite pretzel necklaces that I saw on the internet, the one with cheese is my favorite because…cheese!)

Happy Hacking!

So what are you waiting for? With HarperDB you now have an easy path to getting started with rapid app development, and we’ve provided examples to help give you the inspo you need! Our dev team is always here to help out, we love to watch folks build new stuff on HarperDB. You can join our Slack channel to chat with the community or email support@harperdb.io if you get caught up. Whatever you do, just keep coding, just keep coding, just keep coding. Oh and if you make a pretzel necklace to enjoy while you’re hacking share it in the comments section!