DocuSign Hackathon – $10,000+ in Prizes | Hacker News Reader

DocuSign Hackathon – $10,000+ in Prizes

momentum.docusign.com

14 pointsmroknich13 comments

Every time Docusign is mentioned I can't help think of how they ripped off HelloSign https://www.hellosign.com/blog/docusign-copies-hellosign-use...

That's great, it's called competition and is good for people like me, the customer.

If you don't mind, I just Ctrl-A & copied your excellent blog post about Bidirectional Varint Encoding [0]. I am going to post it on my own tech dev blog with my name replacing yours at the bottom. It's OK, its good for my readers. ;)

[0] - http://samuelhughes.com/blog/9.html

* - not really

That would be copyright infringement. If you don't have a legal right to exclusive use of your UI (for example, the One-Click patent) others have every right to copy you. In fact, mimicry of other UI's is part of every UI.

I sometimes feel like I miss out on cool opportunities like this because I live in a midwestern city. A tech hub like SF probably has as many hackathons/dev meet ups/etc in a weekend as my city does in a year.

But then I look at housing prices and feel a little better.

I read the description, but I’m not entirely sure of what the purpose is of this hackathon? What would contestants be trying to build?

>Bring your ideas for groundbreaking eSignature implementations and compete to win $10,000+ in prizes (along with fame).

clearly some sort of project that uses docusign.

DocuSign's API is very frustrating to work with, as you can't go into production without getting their "approval" first.

Amongst other things, the approval process requires you (or did require you when I last tried) to run a specific number of test transactions on a specific API endpoint.

Whilst reasonable for a complex integration, if someone just wants a simple "send this PDF for signature" script, this complex and slow process simply isn't worth it.

That seems insane. They won’t let you use their API unless you test it? Don’t they have QA teams?

How about everybody get together and just try to improve their API?

What is wrong with their API?

Edit: To be clear, we're actively using it.

It is has a ton of features, yet simple and well designed. Has good documentation and nice tooling.

It wasn't built for API-first use. Their API is a bolt-on to the web interface, whereas HelloSign was built with the API as a first class user. In comparison, DocuSign is much more of a pain to configure.

Of all the document-signing firms I get forced into using, I like them the best because they let me use my touch-enabled laptop to generate my real signature.

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