Beeb Blog

     The Hack U competition officially started on Friday February 20th at 2pm and went for the next 24 hours. I was teamed up with two other undergraduate TAs (Caio Tenca and Eric Spishak) at the University of Washington and we had nothing. We barely even had an idea, it was something that someone had suggested hours before and we built upon it leading up to the start (and throughout) the competition.

The Idea:

     To be able to check your Gmail account via sms services (text messages). We weren't able to find anything from google that was able to do this, to check your mail you needed internet access or a smart phone. Our idea was to make a service that anyone with a phone could use.

      Over the course of the competition we took this basic idea and with our combined knowledge of php along with occasional questions answered by the creator of php himself, Rasmus Lerdorf, we transformed our idea into something we wouldn't have thought possible in that amount of time, or for that matter over the course of a solid week!

     We ended up writing 500 lines of code, setting up a sql database, and offered the commands below:

• unread           - returns the number of unread messages
• list unread #  - returns the most recent # unread messages
• list #              - lists the most recent # messages
• get #              - gets the entire text of a message (split up into blocks of 160 characters)
• search word   - returns messages with the subject line containing "word"
• from person    - returns most recent messages from "person"
• sender #         - returns the # most recent contacts mail received from
• help command - returns a list of commands and what they do

     If you are a registered user and text any one of those commands to mNetFree@gmail.com then you will receive the corresponding data from your gmail account! Our goal was to be able to interact on a very primitive level with a gmail account. What we had at the end was much, much more.

     A big thanks to Caio Tenca and Eric Spishak for helping with this project, I would team up again with you any day. Even if we had come in last place it would have been more than worth it, I probably laughed 90% of the time!

     We are currently in the process of purchasing a domain name to share our project with the rest of the world, for free.

     For our effort and ingenuity we got SECOND PLACE OVERALL for the UW Hack U competition: