Algolia resources for the Hackference hackathon 🛠😺

Hello Hackference hackers! I’m Josh from @Algolia, also as known as the person who just showed you how to search Mike Elsmore’s tweets in order to see how many times he has tweeted about the current Hackference being the last. Spoiler: it’s not zero.

Mike’s expression 👌

Algolia, the friendly neighborhood search API, is thrilled to be back at Hackference and the hackathon for the second year in a row.

I shared a few links up on stage to help you get started with Algolia and forgot many more. Here’s a quick guide to the resources your might find helpful as you get underway:

• algolia/awesome-algolia — Your map into the Algolia universe in one Github repo, with links to all the documentation, guides, SDKs, integrations and much more.
• algolia/datasets — A list of publicly available datasets that you can import into Algolia to try it out or to build on top of.
• algolia/algoliasearch-alexa — An Amazon Alexa skill for using voice to search an Algolia index.
• https://we-rate-tweets.glitch.me — An app hosted on Glitch that shows you to use the Algolia and Twitter APIs to create a shareable search for your tweets. Because it’s hosted on Glitch, you can create your own running copy with just one click — just hit any button that says “Remix”. This app shows you exactly how to do both indexing and search using Algolia’s JavaScript SDK and instantsearch library. The code is well- commented to help you understand what’s going on.
• Algolia’s CSS API client —Did you catch Tim Carry’s talk yesterday about building a search engine using only CSS? The talk was amazing but please, please don’t attempt to build a search engine in a language that has no loops, variables, or functions within the time constraints of a hackathon. Just don’t. But do hit the link when you need a break from your hack and a quick laugh.

Good advice you will hopefully never, ever need

Last but not least, this morning you heard Joe Nash’s presentation about all of the amazing things the Github platform has available to you, and that you can win a prize by building something that’s useful to developers. A few Algolia engineers recently wrote an Atom plugin for autocompleting NPM package names in require() statements and automatically adding the selected package to the project’s package.json file. Have a look at the code if you’re interested to learn how an Atom plugin works and see how you could build one for your hack.

The Algolia prize will go to the most creative use of the API. We’ll have notebooks and Raspberry Pis for everyone on the team. Here’s Pandelis and Scott and the Algolia prize-winning team from last year — see how happy they look!! That. could. be. you.

Anyone at the hackathon is welcome to grab a super-soft Algolia community t-shirt using our online form, here’s the link: https://alg.li/tshirt. Here’s a demo of the t-shirt by Algolia developer advocate (and your MC yesterday on the Develop track) Jessica West.

If you don’t already have an Algolia account, you can sign up here. You’ll get 10,000 records and 100,000 indexing operations per month for free, plus access to our growing community.

If you have any questions, Jessica and I will be around for most of the afternoon (sadly not tomorrow though). In the event you need help and we’re not here, just send one of us a tweet.

Happy Hacking!