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• April 25th, 2013 Events Berlin Geekettes All-Women Hackathon Roundup By Amelie Anglade, Tiffany Conroy, Emily Green, Duana Stanley

  Late last year, six women crowded in to a Mitte cafe booth and listened to Berlin Geekettes founder Jess Erickson share her idea: Berlin’s first all-women hackathon. With SoundCloud’s Amelie Anglade the then newly-appointed the Berlin Geekettes Tech Ambassador, we agreed that it was a great idea to produce the hackathon as a partnership between the Geekettes and the women developers of SoundCloud.

  

  Fast forward to the first weekend of March, when the vision became reality: after 24 hours of hacking, 80 women demoed 29 projects across a range of different platforms, from a belt transformed into a game controller to an app aimed to help toddlers learn to do everyday tasks.

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• April 16th, 2013 Announcements Removing 'hotness' parameter By Paul Osman

  The /tracks endpoint has traditionally accepted an order parameter for ordering results by either creation date or 'hotness'. The method for calculating a tracks 'hotness' has never been clearly explained, but generally speaking is based on the number of likes and listens a track receives.

  Recently we started to experience problems with the query that returns tracks ordered by hotness. In the past weeks, these problems started to effect and even cause outages for API users.

  We have decided that the best way forward is to remove this parameter. Starting soon, GET requests to the /tracks endpoint will ignore the order parameter and default to ordering by creation date.

  In the future, we look forward to releasing support for more stable and idiomatic search and order parameters. In the meantime, it is still possible to approximate the result sets previously returned by specifying order=hotness by manually sorting the returned tracks by a combination of favoritings_count and playback_count.

• January 23rd, 2013 Events Hacking Ideas SoundCloud at PennApps By Paul Osman

  Last weekend, we sponsored and attended our first PennApps, the world's largest student run hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Nearly 500 students participated from a variety of universities across the US and elsewhere. Students were given 36 hours to get into teams, hack on projects, then show them off to the judges. The results were astounding. In total, over 100 hacks were submitted. Here are some of my personal favourites.

  

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• November 2nd, 2012 Guides Coding for GOOD - SoundCloud API By Paul Osman

  The web has come a long way. We have APIs that allow developers to create amazing applications quickly, and browser technologies have advanced to the point where JavaScript / HTML and CSS are necessary tools for creating apps. Despite this, there's still a skills gap and companies are having an increasingly hard time hiring for technical positions.

  This is the main reason the folks at GOOD teamed up with the Apollo Group to launch Coding for GOOD. A series of coding lessons and final project. Participants with the top three submissions will be flown to Los Angeles to participate in a hackathon. The best of the three hacks may be offered a job at GOOD.

  We were excited when GOOD approached us about contributing a lesson on the SoundCloud API, so I sat down with them in their New York office and did a quick walkthrough on using the JavaScript SDK to create a simple SoundCloud app. Check it out, and if you know of anyone new to using web APIs, have them take a look too.

• October 2nd, 2012 Events Story Hack Boston Recap By Paul Osman

  On Saturday, we hosted Story Hack Boston along with P2PU and Mashery at the MIT Media Lab. About 50 people from content and technical backgrounds joined us to create new story telling experiences. The crowd was pretty evenly split, which made for a lot of awesome collaboration.

  

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