[NBLUG/talk] Regarding a recent hackfest I attended

Zack Gold zack at nblug.org
Mon Nov 19 01:14:59 PST 2012


Hi all,

Hope your November is going good so far.

A thought came to related to the hackfests that I attended in the recent
months in San Francisco, where I went to, basically, code sessions for a
big company. One of them was with Facebook at Heroku's headquarters. The
basic idea behind the event was to build an application that would utilize
Heroku's resources (they deal with the server, you focus on the app), and
the best app would win a prize (Facebook swag). Though, the event was nice,
and all the attendees were fed well, I became skeptical about what the
event was really all about. I mean, here you have two big companies who are
inviting the public into a free event, they're paying for the A/C power for
a hundred laptops, they're paying for a rather expensive catered meal from
some random place in SF (that is actually good quality food), and they're
giving away free prizes when you build something that impresses them. I
suppose this is more of a discussion than a question that has been
troubling me for a while now, and I'm just curious what they are trying to
benefit from getting people involved. For anyone who has been to a hackfest
before, what are your thoughts on this? Personally, I feel that they're
trying to get people involved in their APIs and to get people excited about
developing applications for Facebook (or whatever company is hosting the
event), but they're also getting feedback on the usability of their API.

-- 
Zack Gold
NBLUG Scribe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20121119/bca4f3e0/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list