No doubt everyone in the salesforce.com ecosystem has already heard of the $1 million hackathon challenge we have launched in the DevZone at Dreamforce 2013. But just in case you haven’t, the high level is this:
- Build a mobile app
- Make it using something from the Salesforce Platform technologies
- Sign up today and start building, now through November 20
- Get your Hacker Pass to the Dreamforce Developer Zone to take part
- Winner takes home $1,000,000
For the specific T’s and C’s, check out the official hackathon page.
So what is it going to take to make that $1 million app? With so much at stake teams will have to bring their A-game and pull out all the stops to out compete their rivals.
Dream Team
No one knows today what that app will look like or who the winning team will be. You might think that winning team will will have expertise in every software project discipline. To set itself apart in addition to agile and expert coders, that app will need a team to bring to bear design, user experience, and testing.
But you just don’t know. The annals of technology are riddled with stories like two guys in a garage in Palo Alto, the college sophomore who creates a site for students to share about themselves, the man who dreams of enterprise software that is as easy to use as Amazon.com.
Don’t Forget the Clicks
The Force.com Platform is also ideal for rapid application development life cycles, so expertise in configuration and declarative functionality of an org will be critical in a team.
Perhaps you are a developer new to Force.com and haven’t become familiar with all that the declarative features have to offer. Draft an experienced Salesforce Administrator rockstar into your team who can help you build out those declarative features.
For instance maybe you want to build reporting into your app and you’ve heard of the Analytics API, but you’ve not worked with reports and dashboards. Imagine how much a reports expert could help a team to build out killer customizable reporting logic, while a UI expert could work with them to build an awesome mobile UX that used that reporting data in a native or hybrid application.
Perhaps I’m dreaming too big, but I would love to see a declarative-only entry. There is a huge amount you can do on the platform without code, and we’re adding new features every release such as the innate mobility of Chatter publisher actions in Winter ’14. Could a team build a custom mobile application inside the Chatter Mobile App container?
There are even declarative mobile frameworks like Appery.io that require minimal or no coding skills to get up and running. If you are looking for a team to join, or are missing a key skill set, reach out via the Discussion Boards.
Anyone who can build an app on the Salesforce Platform, can enter the $1 million hackathon. So sign up (FREE for a limited time), build your team, and see you in San Francisco!