Hi, I’m Tom Janofsky, an engineer here at Monetate. Last weekend, I helped judge something called Penn Apps along with fellow Monetate engineers Hunter Blanks and Luke Walker.

Penn Apps is an annual application development competition held at the University of Pennsylvania, and if you’re into software engineering, it’s a very cool event. Competing teams of students from the University of Pennsylvania spend two days building web applications with the goal of producing the best app for improving the experience of students on campus. For this year’s event Monetate was around to provide some moral support and help with the judging. Oh yeah, and to make sure nobody went hungry!

Why would there be a risk of young coders going hungry? Well, when I say “two days building web applications” I mean they literally code around the clock, 48 hours straight. It’s a marathon hack-a-thon. Hence the need for pizza and Clif bars. (In the spirit of full disclosure I should point out that our snack donation was not entirely altruistic—it’s no secret we’re looking to hire a few good engineers right now, hence the labels on the bars that say: “Happy hacking from the food cabinet at Monetate, P.S. We’re hiring”.)

I’m not sure if it was the Clif bars, the competitive aspects of the event, or just the raw talent of these student engineers, but the results they produced in just 48 hours were amazing. I have to say that Hunter, Luke, and I were all blown away by the complexity and quality of what the teams produced in just two days.

For this year’s event, Monetate sponsored a prize for the most user-friendly application. We’d like to congratulate the winners, Prutsdom Jiarathanakul, Thanat Owlarn, and Toon Sripatanaskul for their work creating “Who’s in my class?”

“Who’s in my class?” is a web application that allows students to share their course schedule via Facebook. This provides an easy way for students to find out what classes their friends are taking and is obviously a much more efficient way of finding out “who’s in my class” than comparing printed schedules. The app was well executed, useful, and provided a great user experience. Well done!

We look forward to helping out with next year’s event. For all of this year’s winners and photos from the event check out www.PennApps.com.