I won first place at BattleHack Austin - PayPal’s hackathon for developers. BattleHack is a series of competitions all over the world, in places like London, Berlin, and New York. Austin’s was held at TechShop, a great maker space up in Round Rock. 

I ended up building a screen scraper in Ruby, an iPhone app, and a Windows Phone 8 app. Because I made the only Windows Phone 8 app at the hackathon, I also won the Nokia app developer competition. Instead of building a server, I used Windows Azure Mobile Client Services as the backend for the app, as they were one of the sponsors, so I knew I could bug Microsoft’s developer evangelist whenever I got stuck. This worked out really well for what I was doing, especially with the cross-platform support.

The PayPup iOS app is open sourced on GitHub at (https://github.com/jefflinwood/PayPupAppForIOS) - you’ll need to set up your own PayPal and Windows Azure Mobile Client Services accounts and use the corresponding client IDs in the app.

Here’s a link to a story about my app over at the Silicon Hills News.