Pakistani developers win big at Facebook’s F8 Hackathon

A team of Pakistani developers secured second place in Facebook’s F8 Hackathon in San Jose, California. Asad Memon and Azka Qaiser built an application that helps users communicate with pseudo-names in Facebook groups.

The developers from all around the world were invited to hack facebook technologies to bring the world closer together. The event was Held in San Jose at the McEnery Convention Center, thousands of people participated in Facebook’s annual developer conference to experience new technology from the social media giant, learn how developers are innovating on the platform, and explore new ways to build the community.

This year, Facebook added a two-day hackathon in the annual conference in which developers from all around the world were selected to compete using the social media giant’s technologies and innovations. In the hackathon, 145 developers were divided into 53 teams.

The Pakistani developers said:

“We noticed a common pattern in many discussion groups: A lot of members want to discuss important issues but many topics are best discussed in anonymity. Unfortunately, Facebook’s real-name policy forces them to keep mum when they have a lot to contribute otherwise.”

They further added:

“A major inspiration for us to build this app is a Facebook group named ‘Soul Sisters Pakistan’. It is a Facebook group only for females from all around the world connecting them together. It’s a platform where women can ask, share and discuss things they like, but many times there are situations when people don’t want to reveal their identity but they want a solution to their problem at the same time. In such a scenario, they started sending their issues to their friends to post them ‘Anonymously’ on their behalf. This is a ‘hack’ that is widely used by the community.”

There are so many issues which you want to share anonymously especially in the context of Pakistan. Now with the help of this app, you can share your feelings anonymously without the risk of any privacy issue. The app will assign a pseudo-name to each user which will ensure the privacy. The tagline given to the project is “Anonymous conversations for Facebook Groups”.