WE Hack

This weekend, we celebrated the inaugural company-wide hack weekend called WE Hack (Weekend Hack).

The aim of WE Hack was to spend a Friday and Saturday outside of the office to bond as a team and to learn. Listen to Hannes, who explains how WE Hack came to be:

We kicked off Friday morning with everyone pitching their hack ideas and getting their team in shape, here’s an audio snapshot with a selection of teams explaining what they’re building.

Here’s a selection of 20 hacks that were built during the weekend:

Toybox: a toddler’s toy built on Arduino and Raspberry Pi able to play back custom SoundCloud sounds in reaction to the physical world.
Never Ending Story (We Hack 2012 winner): the age-old kid’s game: start a story and pass it on. You just hear the last part and you create the next one. Hacking content!
Soundifyificationizer: turns text into music by mapping groups of characters to MIDI notes for melody and drums.
H.O.V.A: “We build a “HOVA” hovercraft and it is hovering badass! Here’s our blog“
StreadCloud: memefy our Chief Architect Sean Tradway. Includes voting and is powered by Redis & Clojure
Ruly: R U Lost Yet gives your friends and map with audio-powered step-by-step directions
Graphiz: a visualization of connections on SoundCloud
Deutsch Dienstag: an English-German phrasebook. Click an English sentence to hear the German translation
BunnyStall: revive the NabazTag! Take the NabaztagHackKit and build custom Applications for u Bunny!
SoundCal: allows users to add SoundCloud tracks to a calendar via the artwork widget
Foodbaby: a website that let’s you collect your favorite recipes via an “Eat Later” bookmarklet. Once you cooked the meal you can connect the recipe to an Instagram photo of the dish.
Desmond: we ported the Android SoundCloud app to Google’s new experimental media streaming device, the Nexus Q.
Day In Sound: a day in the life of a SoundClouder in 2015
SoundChain: a Chinese whispers like app where you record a sound and send it to someone to continue and eventually make into a chain of sounds.
TweetSpeak: allows you to speak your own tweets. Pick your best tweet, record it, and post it to Twitter.
Wedoc: we documented the weekend by creating audio interviews and montages and by building wehack.sc.
Lunchbox: a mobile app enabling SoundCloud staffers to meet for lunch
Message In A Bottle: short message broadcasting with anonymous replies. Think of anonymous twitter.
The Passion Project: gathering stories of individuals sharing their passion with the world
Screen Printing Workshop: we learned how to screen print our own We Hack tshirts (thanks to our friends at Etsy Labs in Berlin!)

Visit wehack.sc to relive the weekend in reverse chronological order and see our Facebook Page for more photos of the event.

Want to be part of next year’s WE Hack: we’re hiring and you should totally join our team http://soundcloud.com/jobs

Special thanks to Betahaus for providing the We Hack location and to Prinzessinnengarten for hosting us for after-hack drinks.

Extra special thanks to the team responsible for making WE Hack a reality: Hannes, Mathilde, Tim, Nick, Lisa, Matthias, Thom and Alex.