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HackVAN’s APIses and Prizes

HackVAN and Shopify

HackVAN, Vancouver’s big API hackday, takes place this Saturday! If you have any skill or interest in writing apps that make use of publicly available APIs or have ideas on how to turn APIs into applications, you should come down and participate! Here are the quick details:

  • When: Saturday, August 20th, 2011, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
  • Where: Mozilla’s Vancouver offices (163 West Hastings Street, Suite 200, Vancouver BC)
  • How much? A mere $10 for developers to attend.
  • Will I get fed? We’re providing breakfast and lunch.
  • How do I register? Visit the HackVAN registration site.

The APIses

The HackVAN organizers have rounded up a number of APIs that you can use at HackVAN. The idea is to write an application that uses at least one of these APIs and have it working by the end of the day. David Underwood (Developer Advocate) and Yours Truly (Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist) will be there as representatives of Shopify and the Shopify API.

One love four verbs

If you’d like to find out more about the Shopify API, check out our API documentation. It’s a RESTful (or as I like to say, “RESTafarian”) API and quite easy to use. I also wrote a series of articles on getting started with the API:

If you want to see what’s possible with the Shopify API, take a look at our App Store, where developers who’ve built Shopify apps can sell them and where Shopify shopowners can buy and install them, extending the capabilities of their shops.

Ours isn’t the only HackVAN API. Our API buddies include:

The Prizes

Write an app that we deem worthy and you could win of these:

Macbookair1

First prize is a MacBook Air. 11″ diagonally, really skinny, 1.6GHz dual-core Intel i5 Processor, 4 GB RAM, and 128GB mass storage. It’s an amazing and incredibly portable development machine. My friend Andrew Burke uses this as his main machine, where he does Rails and iOS development on it.

Ipad

Second prize: iPad 2. The 16GB WiFi model. My iPad is my “second screen”, notetaking device, ebook reader and favorite portable gaming machine. This one’s being provided by Shopify.

Kindle

Third prize: Amazon Kindle 3G. Free 3G, built-in wifi and space for 3,500 books.

And there will be more prizes, too! If you want a shot at these prizes, come on down on Saturday and participate in HackVAN — register now!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Vancouver Bound

Air canada

I’m off to Vancouver! I’ll be there from Wednesday afternoon to Monday afternoon, primarily to catch HackVAN. Want to catch up? Drop me a line or tweet!

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We’re in Vancouver This Week!

Vangroovy
Creative Commons photo by Casey Yee.

This week, a number of Shopifolks will be in Vancouver. If you see us, come say hi!

Tobi and Harley at the GROW Conference

Grow 2011

Tobias Lütke, our CEO, and Harley Finkelstein, our CPO (Chief Platform Officer) will be attending the sold-out GROW Conference 2011, which will be taking place at the Vancouver Convention Centre’s West Building (the media building for the Olympics) from Wednesday, August 17th through Friday, August 19th. This is the must-attend conference for Canadian startups and entrepreneurs. I’ll leave it to my friend David Crow to describe it:

The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if your business is on or offline, the next-gen entrepreneur knows where their customers are and how to engage them. Today’s entrepreneurs are creating new opportunities, disrupting age-old markets, leveraging technology on their path to being tomorrow’s leaders. The Grow Conference is bringing the best minds of Silicon Valley and Canada together to share lessons learned and inspire action. Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution as we work together to drive innovation for the future. GROW is more than a conference, it’s a movement.

All the tickets that were made available online are sold out. For you super-procrastinators with some money to burn, there will be a very limited number of tickets at the door available at the door for US$595.

David and Joey at HackVAN

HackVAN and Shopify

David Underwood, Developer Advocate, and Yours Truly (Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist) will be sneaking into the GROW Conference after-party, but the real reason we’ll be there will be for the HackVAN Hack Day taking place at the Mozilla offices (163 West Hastings, Suite 200, Vancouver) on Saturday, August 20th. HackDays are events that are being held across Canada where developers get together, and working either in teams or solo, build cool applications in a day using publicly available APIs. If you’re a developer of any level of experience, from just starting out to guru-level, come out, make new friends and connections and get a chance at winning some cool prizes (up for grabs: a MacBook Air, iPad 2 and Kindle).

Registration for this event is a mere $10 — register now, and we’ll see you on Saturday!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.