Pakistani developers secure second place at Facebook's F8 Hackathon

A team of Pakistan developers secured second place in Facebook’s F8 Hackathon in San Jose, California, Geo.TV has learnt.

Asad Memon and Azka Qaiser built an application that helps users communicate with pseudo-names in Facebook groups.

The F8 Hackathon recently took place in California and developers from around the world were invited to hack Facebook’s technologies to bring the world closer together.

Held in San Jose at the McEnery Convention Center, thousands participated in Facebook's annual developer conference to experience new technology from the social media giant, learn first-hand 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 across the world were selected to compete using the social media giant’s technologies.

In the hackathon, 145 developers were divided into 53 teams.

The Pakistani duo secured second place and shared the news on Memon's Facebook page and their blog post, DevPost.com.

"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," the Pakistani developers said regarding the inspiration behind their app.

"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 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, they added.