On November 9th and 10th, the developers, Matthew Hamilton, Alec Turnbull, and Courteney Ervin competed in Hack ‘N Jill’s Hacksgiving hackathon. Hack ‘N Jill organizes events for the NYC tech community with an emphasis on 50:50 gender participation. Their Hacksgiving challenge gave developers and designers a chance to use their skills to benefit “the social, global, and greater good.”
Matt, Alec, and Courteney created a DonorsChoose.org themed Google Chrome extension (pictured above and below) called “Reply For All.” Their brilliant idea was to “fight e-mail laziness with good.” The extension works by allowing the user to pledge a donation to DonorsChoose.org when sending an e-mail. The user then sets a certain timeframe for the recipient of the e-mail to reply. If the recipient replies within the given timeframe, the donation to DonorsChoose.org goes through. If the recipient is a victim of “email-laziness,” the donation is not made. What a great incentive to quickly reply to an e-mail!
At Hacksgiving the competition was stiff, but the trio of hackers came in second for their clever efforts to combat email laziness while helping public schools in need. What did these winners have to say about their lessons learned? “E-mail headers are actually quite hard to parse for information, email arrivals are very tough to time correctly so plan accordingly, and the 2 hours before the demo at a hackathon always yields the nastiest bugs you've never seen.”Congratulations Matt, Alec, and Courteney! Thank you for using your “hacking” skills for “the greater good.”
