Why

The motivation behind the WoH is the Paradox of Choice — basically, making decisions is stressful. It's true at the super market and it's true with online hackathons.

At any given time, ChallengePost is powering 10-20 online hackathons, often more. And while they each have great prizes, cool APIs, and fun problems, picking one from a group of 20 is still difficult. So, I thought, why not eliminate choice and make it random?

How

I searched Github for "wheel of" projects, and found an excellent repo called Wheel of Lunch by Jack Palmer. WoL uses your location to populate a roulette wheel (built with canvas) with local restaurants and when you spin the wheel, it selects one at random and provides you with a Google Maps link. It also throws up some HTML5 Confetti.

WoL was perfect for my WoH project. All I had to do was strip out the geo-location & mapping parts, create a JSON object with hackathon data (name, url, thumbnail, prizes, deadline) from challengepost.com/discover, and add some JavaScript to fill in the appropriate details in the popup. (I kept the confetti too.)