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Developer Week SF 2020 Agora Highlights Featured

Developer Week SF 2020 Agora Highlights

By Author: Team Agora In Developer

Last month, Agora attended Developer Week SF 2020 as a sponsor, setting up a booth and holding multiple presentations while also offering prizes for the DevWeek Hackathon. It was a fantastic event that helped us raise awareness of the Agora platform within a large and growing developer community.

Not only that, but our Developer Evangelists also hosted an Agora Hackathon alongside the regular DevWeek Hackathon. We had some amazing winners who came up with incredibly innovative solutions that we’d love to point out.

For those who haven’t been, Developer Week is “the World’s Largest Developer & Engineering Technology Conference & Expo.” Attendees included everyone from front-end developers to C-level executives and everyone in-between. It was held in the Oakland Convention Center from Feb 12-14, and had over 190 speaker sessions alongside ongoing workshops and special events.

Left: Shaocheng Yang, Dev Evangelist, right: Hermes Frangoudis, Dev Evangelist

Expo and speaking sessions ran all day long. One of our Dev Evangelists, Shaocheng Yang, hosted a 50-min workshop where he used Agora to build an Android app completely in that timeframe. Hermes Frangoudis, another Dev Evangelist on our team, presented on the main stage, covering the pros and cons of various augmented reality platforms and highlighted strong use-cases that led to the audience asking follow-up questions about Agora specifically.

Another trend observed at this year’s event was an increased presence of companies focusing on simplifying back-end infrastructure, including LogDNA, SpinUp, and CTO.ai. These solutions streamline processes and eliminate the need for specialized engineering roles in the DevOps field.

Making New Industry Connections

The Agora team met with over 400 people throughout the event, including notables from the government, finance, education, gaming, and healthcare industries. This included engineers who talked about replacing their current project and finance-tracking platforms with ones developed via Agora.

Other reps were intrigued by the possibility of Agora being packaged into certain SDKs to support new online banking account registration regulations. Agora’s RTM is also being considered as a white label solution or referral partnership for any customers looking to add interactivity to their streams.

The Agora Hackathon Winners!

In parallel to the main hackathon, the Agora Hackathon invited teams to implement the Agora SDK in an innovative way for prizes. First place would win $500 while second place would receive $250.

We had nine teams sign up and pitch their projects. Results ended up ranging from live chat use cases to docusign to virtual reality and much more.

Who won in the end? Funny enough, the same two teams that won our hackathon also won the DevWeek Hackathon. They both brought their top game to each competition, and their win was well-deserved.

First Place! – Team Audia: Comprised of a group of AI researchers, this team used the Agora Video SDK to build RockBand Live. This would let a user import any YouTube link and use AI to remove select portions of audio tracks from the sound. Then the user can join a group video chat and sing along to the music video, recording the results, and create a highlight reel.

Team Audia – Hackathon First Place Winners
From left to right: Jason Benn, Hermes Frangoudis (Agora), Josh Albrecht and Bryden Fogelman

Second Place! – Team Intellecture: Comprised of Mountain View High School students, this team developed a web app that would let professors create unique class sessions and allow student logins. Students would be able to provide real-time feedback to lecturing professors, improving comprehension and classroom interactivity. It enables Q&A sessions and sends notes to the professor post-lecture so they can refine their presentations for future classes.

Team Intellecture – Hackathon Second Place Winners
From left to right: Jonathan Liu, Hermes Frangoudis (Agora), Tony Xin, Arjun Patrawala

Congrats to both teams! On a side note, after being involved in our competition, both teams were also interested in joining our AllThings RTC event in Summer 2020. We’ll keep you updated on that front.

We appreciate the hard work of everyone who attended and the tireless promotion of our Developer Evangelists. Agora continues to grow and make solid connections in new industries that will see platform and SDK adoption spreading even further than we imagined.

Team Agora