AngelHack unites 100+ developers to hack on big data

Michael

Ryan

By Ryan Boyd and Michael Manoochehri, Cloud Developer Relations

Last weekend, we had the pleasure of joining 100+ developers at the AngelHack Big Data hackathon in San Francisco. The event, hosted at the HUB co-working space, was a fantastic gathering of people interested in hacking away on big data.

We had a great time talking with developers about Google BigQuery and the Google Cloud Platform, getting some new feature requests, and learning new things from the folks at Firebase, Couchbase, p(k) and more. We were happy to see a couple dozen developers having the chance to try out BigQuery over the weekend. We also did our first in-person demo of a query running a regular expression match across 13 billion rows (1TB) of data in just 23 seconds, which was very well received!

We went to the event bearing some App Engine schwag and a $250 gift certificate to the Google Play Store to be awarded to the best project that incorporated Google BigQuery or App Engine for crunching big data. We also had a number of datasets to share with the group ranging from stock data provided by NASDAQ Data-On-Demand (powered by Xignite) and US birth statistics data to Wikipedia revision histories + pageviews and n-grams from Google Books.

The prize for the best use of BigQuery or App Engine went to Deepti Yadlapalli and Sushma Yadlapalli. They created a mashup with the NASDAQ stock data, BigQuery and Prior Knowledge's Veritable API to look at correlation between the ask/bid spreads of various stock tickers. Congrats!

Thanks to all the fantastic developers who joined us for the hackathon, and also to the organizers of AngelHack for producing a great event.

Our team is traveling to London for Strata next week. We’re also going to be attending a number of other events, including the London GDG, Big Data London meetup, Big Data Analytics Sydney meetup, Sydney GDG and the Google for Entrepreneurs Day in Sydney. If you’re at any of those events, stop by and let us know what you’re doing with big data!


Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on big data. He's been at Google for 6 years and previously helped build out the Google Apps ISV ecosystem. He published his first book, "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0", with O'Reilly.

Michael Manoochehri is a Developer Programs Engineer working with Google's Cloud developer products. With many years of experience working for research and non-profit organizations, he's interested in making large scale data analysis more accessible and affordable.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor