John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Braintree and PayPal Developer Relations

This past weekend, our fourth installation of the BattleHack series kicked off in Raleigh, North Carolina as 19 teams competed fiercely to win a place in BattleHack World Finals.

BattleHack Raleigh took place in the heart of the historic City Market at 214 Martin Street where hackers were treated with true Southern hospitality. Hackers divulged in a Southern cookout with smoked pork shoulders, fish fry, mac and cheese & shrimp and grits. To top it all off, hackers ended the evening with an array of state fair sweets including deep fried twinkies, cotton candy and caramel apples.

In the end, PayPal & Braintree announced Team PairCode as the winner of BattleHack Raleigh. James Lemieux, Jason Humphries, Brent Piephoff and Magdalyn Duffie of team PairCode built a pair coding app for beginner coders that challenges the players to build a basic front end website through a series of tasks using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Players engage in a back and forth dialog that teaches and promotes pair coding. The app includes links to outside resources for players to do research and purchase challenge hints via PayPal. Inspired by Magdalyn’s passion for teaching kids to program, the team decided to build this app to reach a bigger audience of beginner coders. Team PairCode will go on to represent Raleigh at BattleHack World Finals in Silicon Valley this November as they compete against the teams from around the world for the $100,000 grand prize.

Although team PairCode were the clear winners, our judges, Allyson Sutton, Director at HQ Raleigh; Burr Sutton, Product Management Director at Red Hat; Jay Bigelow, Director of Entrepreneurship at Council of Entrepreneurial Development, NC; and Jonathan LeBlanc, Head of Developer Advocacy at Braintree and PayPal, were impressed by all of the teams in Raleigh.

In second place, Team FixMyFolks created a web platform for fixing computers in local communities through charity-driven remote technical support. Team FixMyFolks took home Xbox One consoles. Finally, in third place, Team Forgone Conclusion won Adafruit ARDX kits for their app that incentivizes good driving behavior by awarding cash while charging those who drive recklessly.

We are excited to see what Team PairCode will produce at the World Finals this November. But first, we’ll head over to London for our next hack!

To find out more about BattleHack, please visit https://2015.battlehack.org/