Over the last few weeks there has been quite a bit of new development being done on the CampusLIVE! site and Jared thought it would be a good idea to give developers a break from the every-day coding. He decided that today we would take a 3 hour block of time from 9am – 12pm and see what we could brainstorm with a new technology he found. We plan to do this about every 2 weeks so things will be getting very interesting at CampusLIVE!

Today’s Hack-A-Thon was based on a service offered by a new start-up called PubNub. PubNub is a blazingly fast cloud-hosted data network for building real-time web and mobile applications at scale. We wanted to see what we could do with this by integrating it into our current system but we did not want to have any adverse effects on our user-base so we decided to make it an internal tool for the time being. However I wanted to share this with my readers because it really is a nice service that is being created by PubNub.

We integrated the messaging system into our user registrations, auction bid’s, raffle entries and daily spin functionality. It really puts things into perspective when you see just how fast people are completing actions on the site.

If you look in the header of the image you will notice different icons with counts. These are the counts for those activities over the last minute. As the items are scrolling down the screen you can also click on them to make them dock to the bottom of the list and remain on the screen. The default behavior is for them to flow off the screen as new events come in.

The 3 hour Hack-A-Thon was possible thanks to the following people who participated: Jared Stenquist, Ansel Stein, Mike Miklavic, Jeff Bachand and myself. Next we will be looking at how we can implement this to improve the experience for our users. It’s activities like this that really make me appreciate CampusLIVE as an employer.