Over the past 15 years hackathons have sprung up all around the globe. They can be relatively small and local or then can be massive and attract techies and programmers from around the world. But what exactly is a “hackathon”? First off, you can relax as it doesn’t involve the dark cyber side of hacking. A hackathon is place where people passionate in IT technology gather, form teams and compete as they try to solve specific challenge or bring out new ideas through developing and writing code solutions. The focus of most of these events is around the use of APIs to develop innovative websites, mobile apps, robots and almost anything the mind can imagine. Wikipedia defines hackathon as, “ Hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming.” The grey matter will be heating up and the coding fingers will be flying across the keyboards, hopefully not hitting any impossible roadblocks.
This year TechCrunch is hosting the Disrupt SF Hackathon which will be taking place at Pier 48 in San Francisco on September 6-7, 2014. Prizes will be awarded in over 20 different application areas, including such sponsors as; Twitter, Weather Underground, MasterCard, DigitalOcean and Old Navy to name just a few. Coding wizards will be racing to the finish line, all hoping to win prizes but more importantly – to win the competition amongst their peers. Monitis will be in attendance and will be sponsoring a breakfast for the over 700 expected contestants. Mikayel Vardanyan, Monitis General Manager, said, “The TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon is a perfect gathering place for everyone whose business is software. We are excited about the event and look forward to meeting with tech whizzes and potential clients. We are very much in favour of the idea of allowing developers to extend the possibilities of our software so that they can customize it to meet specific requirements. That is why we provided an open API for our platform.” So come and see us at breakfast, share ideas and then …..
And while the hackathons are fun, challenging and a wonderful social networking path for the software superstars and up and comers, it is also filled with examples of very sizable successes that were well beyond the initial scope of the hackathons. One example is a group messaging app that was eventually acquired by Skype for over $50 million. Another outcome from a hackathon was the development of the Facebook “Like” and Facebook chat. So while the competition was developed to foster code networking development and idea sharing, it can often lead to new products and concepts. That is part of the magic that can come out of 48 sleepless hours.
So get ready to compete and have fun. We hope to see you in Frisco.