Google’s First Asia Hackathon was held yesterday over here in Singapore Management University. We were fortunate to make it considering that seats were already filled to the brim during the online registration phase.

With an eventual 100+ people ending up on the waiting list, we were thankful that sources were timely. With Google being one of the fastest innovator on internet technology, I’m not surprised that developers were flocking to this event. 9 hours of Google Devfast, I’m proud to say we survived!

The talk’s theme was mostly based on Opensocial. While the overall event in general was good, certain presentations seemed a little slower paced. The engineers spoke about the best practices for Open Social API and gave a little insight on developments like the insanely popular social networking site in South America, Orkut. Tutorials and codes were presented to give us a very hands on feel. It felt rather like a workshop, a free one.

An introduction of various APIs and languages were discussed on how they were implemented. Like Json and Python, developers were showed a few demos. Dinner was served in between the talks and free beer was served. How appropriate. Open source = Free beer. The talk lasted till 10pm until all of us were entirely tired out, when all attendees were given a free Google Devfest T-shirt. Thumbs up for the event! We hope Google organizes more of these events here in Singapore.

Pamela, one of the Google engineers kickstarted with a browser war question.

The auditorium was packed to the brim.

Apache presentation

Friendster's attempt to woo application developers.

Free T-shirt. Notice the word 'Asia' is misspelled.