I was invited to a Hackathon that one of our client's client was throwing. Being that I love programming and learning, I decided I would go.

The event was in Cambridge, MA. I arrive early, (my friend said there would be a lot more traffic than there was at that time of day) so I got a tour of office. It's situated in an old, what I believe to be, factory building. The coolest part of the office was that they had whiteboard paint on every wall surface, complete with markers of course.

The event started and people who were attending had tossed up ideas on the white board. A couple people wanted to integrate LinkedIN with HubSpot. Another person wanted to integrate Eventbrite with HubSpot, to get information to/from event goers after the event ends. I didn't like any of those ideas and my only experience with HubSpot is their Leads API, so I stuck to what I know.

I had an idea for an app the second I walked in the door, it was like magic. My main hassle was that HubSpot's Canvas integration REQUIRES HTTPS. Now, my web host is DreamHost and I am kind of cheap, so of course I don't have any way to host a HTTPS site immediately. A big part of me wanted to bite the bullet and order a secure server from DreamHost, or setup another linode, but I felt that I've been spending a lot of money lately and that I would figure out a way. Adrian, my contact at HubSpot, of who I am working with on the PPC project(more on that later), walked by and saved me.

He asked if I had ever used GoogleAppEngine. Of course I hadn't because I was under the belief that it cost money to use, but then I realized I was thinking of Amazon's EC2. I sign up for GAE and within an hour I have a HelloWorld site setup. The slow part was installing Python2.5 so I could use the same version that GAE used and not have to fix a lot of backwards compatibility errors between 2.5->2.7.

After I had a site up that could do HTTPS I dove into programming for my HubSpot app. The app I am doing for work graphs leads per day combined with Google AdWords data per day. I decided …

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