In 2013 William Owens, Zachary Shuford and I took 2nd place in Hackathon Charlotte MMXIII.
One of my team mates explained our entry:
It was sponsored in part by Harris Teeter, and the focus was on "Big Data." So we had transaction data for about 50K purchases made in Charlotte at five stores in April. We took that and combined it with a bunch of census data, breaking Mecklenburg County down into 470 neighborhoods and figured out how to do some cool metrics with it. Like, if you wanted to know the average home value of people who buy sandwiches from the deli on Thursdays, I could do that. Or, say, I could tell you what percentage of people who buy beer at 1:00 in the morning at a certain store dropped out of High School.
-Zachary Shuford May 19, 2013
Our application used the ASP.Net MVC framework, we created a couple of visuals using the Data Driven Documents javascript library (also known as d3.js), and used Twitter's Bootstrap for the styles. We were using my Azure account to host the application, and the data was stored in a SQL Server database which we interacted with using NHibernate. We were almost disqualified for using SQL Server because one of the judges thought that since the requirement was for our code to be open source that we should have been using using a MySQL database. We had to explain that all our code was open source and available here on Github and that we could just as easily have used another database if we thought it would be a problem. Who knows, maybe we would have come in first if we had.
