36 Hours of Innovation: Docusign at SD Hacks 2016

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For 36 hours from Friday, September 30 through Sunday, October 2, over 1000 designers, engineers, tinkerers, and hackers from colleges all over California gathered in La Jolla at the University of California (UC) San Diego’s RIMAC gym. The purpose was to solve tough problems, build innovative solutions, learn about new technologies, and make new friends at the second iteration of SD Hacks. Students were encouraged to tinker with everything from APIs to Arduinos to Microsoft’s HoloLens in order to complete an original project that would be judged on categories like complexity, functionality, innovation, design, and “awesomeness.”

From hardware to software, all sorts of hacks were on display

(photo courtesy Annie Liou Photography)

Over the course of the weekend, teams of up to 4 students worked around-the-clock with help from mentors from companies like Google, ViaSat, and Docusign (of course) on their hacks to win prizes and to wow judges and their peers. Docusign contributed a DJI Phantom 3 drone and two Amazon Echo devices as prizes for the team that produced the best hack around the Docusign API.

Docusign evangelist Aaron Liao on the main stage enticing students to build on the Docusign API with cool prizes

(photo courtesy Annie Liou Photography)

Between long coding sessions, students attended workshops hosted by event sponsors, tried their hand at VR programming at one of the 10 VR stations, waited for parts to print at the 3D printing stations, and occasionally took a gaming break at the on-site gaming lounge.

Docusign engineer Naveen Gopola hard at work mentoring students

Docusign engineer Nick Reed working with students on their projects

At the conclusion of the event, Team Docusign (Naveen Gopola, Nick Reed, and yours truly) voted on the best implementation of the Docusign API from a list of 12 submissions. The competition was fierce and Trivents emerged victorious. Trivents (Alexander Garcia, Andrew George, Arkin Gupta, and Ahan Mukhopadhyay) built an app with the goal of making events easier to manage and register. They built a one-stop shop and consolidated services like Eventbrite, Google+, and Meetup. Each event that is in Trivents gets a unique QR code for easy pre-event registration and seamless on-site sign-in at the event. All of this was built on a variety of frameworks and APIs – namely, the Meteor.js framework and MongoDB backend, APIs from Facebook, Google, Eventbrite, and of course, the Docusign API for signatures and event waivers. Well done, Trivents! The Docusign team is excited to see what you do next!

Take a look at Trivents on Github

Collegiate hackathons like SD Hacks are an amazing way for young talent -- and new ideas -- to thrive. It was truly remarkable to be part of it.

If you’d like to see what you can do with the Docusign API, check it out at our Developer Center and sign up for our new developer newsletter. You can also find us on Twitter @DocuSignAPI.