Ask HN: What is your most impressive hackathon project? - Windson
======
franciscop
I won a NASA world competition by building a Heads Up Display (AR) and motion
tracking software in ~36h with a classmate. Around 1 year before the Hololens
and similar solutions existed.

As my classmate and I were talking through Skype the night before the
competition started, I looked through my window and could see the stars.
However, I could also see my face dimly lit from my laptop screen overlapping.
So it came to me that it was a great way of making a HUD for a prototype.

We got to it and built the prototype from scratch. It took a lot of work and
resourcefulness, rushing to get a webcam from friends that would work a Sunday
morning (in Spain that year shops were closed on Sundays). Then we used
several languages I already knew, if I remember correctly: HTML, CSS, PHP as
the HUD display was actually a webpage, Processing for hand tracking and C++
for Arduino. I made the whole software part and my classmate the
hardware+electronics. There were some more things like sensors and stuff that
we made.

For the local phase we made it theatrical starting with the moon landing audio
and the lights off, with me entering wearing the helmet and barely able to
breathe and my classmate with the laptop and cables. Connect the projector and
a screen appears. I'm sweating, but I point with my finger at a part of the
screen and it correctly reads where and displays the info real-time. The same
for the other 4 points and I can feel truly happy inside that it is working.

After winning the local one we rushed to get votes since we got into the
People's Choice category and we had a strong battle against Macedonia's team.
They were Trending Topic for most of the week the contest was happening in
their whole country while in Spain it was all about football and celebs and we
just made it into regional newspapers at that point. Another team also used
bots but of course NASA people detected it. We won in the end, visited Cape
Canaveral and saw a rocket launch.

One of the best moments (of my life) was when I came to class after winning
the whole thing and everyone stood up and started clapping.

Here is the project, [https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/project/space-
helmet/](https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/project/space-helmet/) (yes, for
the video we used a fishtank and printed GoPros as props)

Many edits: added extra info and details, sorry for the long post.

~~~
fudged71
For such an impressive project the Github page is surprisingly sparse!

~~~
franciscop
"space" is the Processing files for detecting the hand, "web" is for showing
and reading the data on screen and the .ino for Arduino. If I remember
correctly I struggled quite a bit with the hand detection system and then we
had to adapt it to the light conditions of the place, finding a good way to do
it, etc.

Also of course I was just a couple of years in with learning programming while
studying an unrelated degree.

------
ollerac
[https://swarmation.com/](https://swarmation.com/)

Our team of 3 won the first Node Knockout by a slim margin with this realtime,
multiplayer, pixel formation game.

Edit: Thank you for your positive feedback! Send me suggestions and ideas if
you have any.

Tip: press spacebar.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Most of the time nobody gets the shape right. Could it be lag or server
issues?

~~~
ollerac
Sometimes people move around at the last second and that can confuse things.
But, ya, I've noticed some bugginess with the formations too. I'll look into
it.

I didn't engineer the back-end, that was all @steadicat, but the way I think
it works is if 3 or more clients confirm a formation they're a part of as
correct, it's marked as correct. That way the server doesn't have to check
every pixel on the board. But it can cause some issues if some of the clients
are laggy.

------
awjr
I'd spent an intense week coding so was feeling a bit burnt out with a
hangover. So decided to create a tube map of Bath Cycle Routes with the help
of one other on the day.

Many iterations later the map and the process through which the map is created
is being used nationally and internationally. I've done workshops. Spoken at
national conferences. The local tourist office hands it out. It's going to be
in next months local authority magazine. Even had enquiries from local
authorities to make these for them.

It's up for a local award in innovation (will find out in June if I've won).
[https://cyclebath.org.uk/2017/05/11/finalist-creative-
bath-a...](https://cyclebath.org.uk/2017/05/11/finalist-creative-bath-awards-
innovation/)

Something that was a "meh _really_ do not want to code today" hack has turned
into a bit of a monster.

I think it would be good to automate how these maps are created, but there
really is an artform to making them work well and require an immense amount of
local knowledge and public consultation.

~~~
hurricaneSlider
There was a thesis I read on automated metro map drawing which beautifully
proved it's equivalence to another NP-Complete problem, and then proceeded to
use a constraint solver to create locally optimal solution. Was quite a
complex set of constraints. But it ended up with some good results.

------
throwaway_beerz
I drank beers and chilled for a week while people were burning out coding for
free. That's the most impressive thing I've done at an hackaton. I code 24/7
from Monday to Friday for the same company, sometimes on the weekends too.
They said hackatons are optional so I took a break and was fresh the next
Monday at the office ;)

~~~
wand3r
> 24/7 Monday to Friday

That's 24/5.

~~~
majewsky
Also, I would be very skeptical of anyone who claims to be coding 24 hours a
day. ;)

------
nailer
"How can mirrors be real if eyes aren't real?" \- Jaden Smith

I made a Chrome Extension that blocks eyes:
[https://vimeo.com/90351144](https://vimeo.com/90351144)

If someone runs a dumb ideas hackathon in London, my next plans are either:

\- Song lyrics to nineties powerpoint presentation converter, with lots of
bullets and stock photos, and timed transitions

\- A computer vision and Mortal Kombat-style announcer for pissing the shit
off toilet seats

------
emdowling
I built a digital bank for refugees that would allow them to set up a bank
account, move their funds for safe keeping and also store documents securely.
Authentication happened entirely through a 6 digit code and facial and voice
recognition through use of video. The idea was that refugees or other
displaced persons would be able to access their documents and funds through
any device, so that they could easily establish their identity and life in a
new country.

The other aspect was location verification. Working with NGOs, you could use
this authentication method to let displaced persons login at certified
locations. This solves two big issues:

1\. Family member tracking. Red Cross and other organisations spend millions
of dollars each year tracing where family members ended up. It is quite common
for families to be split - reuniting them is a multi-year, labour intensive
job. Solving that would do the world a whole lot of good.

2\. Journey verification. When assessing refugee visa status, governments
spend a lot of time trying to verify what journey a particular person took to
get there to prove that they are legitimately a refugee. If a refugee could
irrefutably prove their journey, then it would dramatically cut down on visa
processing times.

We won that hackathon - I just wish I had time to develop it more. Tried to
find who to talk to but the idea of using technology to solve the refugee
crisis seems a little outlandish to traditional NGOs who (rightly so) place a
lot of emphasis on food and shelter over apps.

~~~
pparkstroller
We tackled this as well in [https://devpost.com/software/the-
invisibles](https://devpost.com/software/the-invisibles) and an NGO is working
in Greece with this as well as the other needs you mentioned.

------
codefined
My team (5 others) and I built an application that would help you revise or
learn a subject by testing you about it, where that subject could be anything,
from mathematics to Shakespeare.

It worked by scraping the top 1000 Bing results and then scraping several
levels deep from each of the results to generate a "map" of knowledge. This in
turn could be used to ask the user questions, generated fill-in-the-blanks,
matchups & whatever else you could think up.

It worked after the five-day hackathon, which was truly surprising, but
unfortunately, it used too much computing power so we never released it to the
world.

~~~
rprameshwor
I'm interested to know more about the tools/techniques you used to scrap the
sites and clean the results. I am working on scraping contents from a couple
of sites and it seems to be a pain, probably because i don't have lot of
experience around it.

~~~
wasi0013
If you are familiar with python then try scrapy[1]. You can also scrape
websites using beautifulsoup4[2]

[1] [https://scrapy.org/](https://scrapy.org/) [2]
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4)

~~~
codefined
We actually used Node.JS' request module, combined with some NLP (using
natural) in order to pick out the main content. This worked pretty well, but
for our purposes we didn't need it to be perfect because anything like headers
would be removed when we processed the content (not being full sentences).

------
ganeshkrishnan
I have been to couple of hackathons. My second favorite is

WikiNomad:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wikinomad](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wikinomad)
, [https://www.wikinomad.com](https://www.wikinomad.com)

I improved on this after the hackathon too.

My personal favorite was predicting depression before it occurs in a person
using just his cellphone. We worked on Stanford thesis that was able to
predict depression based on the number of wifi points a user connected to
variances to the wifi points.

We increased the data points to GPS, wake times, bluetooth connections, text
sentiment analysis and amount of facebook + instagram apps usage and using
neural networks trained to classify a user as depressed with a probability
value.

------
sideproject
I created "SideProjectors" \- a marketplace for developers and entrepreneurs
to buy and sell their side projects (and also you can show your side projects
off too!).

[https://www.sideprojectors.com](https://www.sideprojectors.com)

It won second prize sponsored by Freelancer at a local hackathon. That was
almost 4 or 5 years ago now. I've improved the site a few times since then and
it's still going quite strong! :)

------
qrv3w
A Harry Potter style "Maruauder's Map" which tracks people in a
business/location in real-time. [1]

[1] [https://github.com/schollz/find-
maraudersmap](https://github.com/schollz/find-maraudersmap)

~~~
wyldfire
I do solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Do the footsteps gradually fade
in and out like the movie FX?

~~~
r3bl
Damn, I remember another Marauder's Map that was just genius!

Long story short, Facebook's Messenger automatically geotagged users by
default. People reported it to their security program, Facebook said it was
intended. Then someone made a browser extension that looked up location of
active Messenger friends and showed their location on a map. It got
increasingly popular. Facebook decided to switch the location from opt-out to
opt-in.

Some sources:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/28/marauders...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/28/marauders-
map-chrome-app-tracks-facebook-messenger)

[https://www.quora.com/Can-I-still-download-the-Marauders-
Map...](https://www.quora.com/Can-I-still-download-the-Marauders-Map-Chrome-
extension-Does-it-still-work)

[https://github.com/arank/marauders-map](https://github.com/arank/marauders-
map)

------
bjelkeman-again
Not mine, but my now colleagues attended a World Bank supported hackathon [1]
and created the prototype for a water quality testing kit for smartphones,
Caddisfly [2]. It ended up becoming a product which essentially gives you very
close to lab results from an inexpensive and easy to operate field kit.

I normally consider hackathons a questionable way to engage the tech
community. In my opinion they seldom lead to anything sustainable and set the
wrong expectations. [3]

Disclosure: I helped finance the continued product development through our
organisational work.

[1] [http://www.techsangam.com/2011/11/08/my-thoughts-on-
bangalor...](http://www.techsangam.com/2011/11/08/my-thoughts-on-bangalore-
first-water-hackathon/)

[2]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969716...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969716301553)

[3] [https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/07/are-hackathons-
stupid/6...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/07/are-hackathons-stupid/6111/)

------
yeldarb
My devpost profile: [https://devpost.com/yeldarb](https://devpost.com/yeldarb)

I tend to work solo at Hackathons.

My favorite project was a presentation remote for Google Glass[1]. You could
control your presentation with the touch bar on the side of the glasses, see
your current slide in the HUD, and it also included a timer so you could make
sure you didn't run over your talk's time limit.

Second favorite was Cardwolla[2]. A system where you could register your
credit card and your dwolla account and a corresponding API for websites. If
user and site had both opted in to taking dwolla it would route around the
credit card system using the dwolla api to avoid to avoid the 2.7% credit card
processing fees.

[1] [https://devpost.com/software/presentation-remote-for-
google-...](https://devpost.com/software/presentation-remote-for-google-glass)

[2]
[https://devpost.com/software/cardwolla](https://devpost.com/software/cardwolla)

------
samort7
Attended my first hackathon last month. We built "Spitter". It speaks twitter!
You subscribe to someone's twitter account through it and whenever they tweet,
you'll get a phone call and an automated voice will read out the tweet to you.
Was really cool/creepy the next morning when we started getting calls with a
robot reading Trump tweets about Obamacare to us!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Oh tell me it does voices, according to who's tweeting!

~~~
timpark
Sounds like a job for Lyrebird!
[https://lyrebird.ai/demo](https://lyrebird.ai/demo)

------
nishs
A real-time voice-based lyrics suggester, in a web browser. Similar to a
karaoke machine, but the rhyming words are generated based on your most recent
word.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3aOPo5ofPU&t=47m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3aOPo5ofPU&t=47m)

~~~
futbol4
Can you elaborate on some of the tech you used to make this? Pretty cool to be
able to hear a word and provide another word which rhymes.

~~~
nishs
Sure!

We generated the rhyming words using the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary [1].
These were saved in a map, which mapped a word to its list of rhyming words.
Initially, the rhyming words produced were short and uninteresting. So we
repeated this process, but this time sorted the rhyming words by "coolness",
which at its simplest, was a measure of the word's length and the number of
phonemes. To save time, the map contained only 20k of the most popular English
words. The map was encoded as JSON and served to the browser.

In the browser, the Web Speech API performed speech recognition. Each time we
detected the end of a sentence, we used the last word to look up a list of
rhyming words from the map. The rhyming words were then displayed in a
randomized order. This continued in a loop.

There's also a tiny Q&A section in the video [2].

[1] [http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-
bin/cmudict](http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict)

[2]
[https://youtu.be/M3aOPo5ofPU?t=47m50s](https://youtu.be/M3aOPo5ofPU?t=47m50s)

------
zopf
I made a thing that turns my Instagram posts into ambient soundscapes by
understanding the content of the images, searching for relevant sounds, and
mixing them into looped audio scenes.

It was made for the Monthly Music Hackathon in NYC held at Spotify, but it
ended up being not terribly musical and more about just fun with audio and
convnets :)

[https://zopf.github.io/ambiance](https://zopf.github.io/ambiance)

Oh yeah! And for another instance of the same meetup, I teamed up with a guy
who was great with audio synthesis, and I hooked up an Arduino and a gyroscope
and microphone to my drumstick, and we made a wireless throat-singing,
spatially-aware percussion instrument:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-g1GBaTevk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-g1GBaTevk)

------
AaronLasseigne
The company I worked at did a 2 week long hackathon. Another developer and I
built a Ruby gem that creates service objects which integrate nicely into the
Rail ecosystem. It was a bunch of fun and over time it ended up becoming a big
part of our codebase. We open sourced it and it's done pretty well
([https://github.com/orgsync/active_interaction](https://github.com/orgsync/active_interaction)).
In fact, I was at a conference and met a guy who's company was using it. It
was really cool to run into someone benefiting from my work.

------
Glench
Screamy Bird — A clone of Flappy Bird but instead of tapping on the screen to
make the bird flap you scream at your phone.
[http://glench.com/ScreamyBird](http://glench.com/ScreamyBird) (Works best in
Firefox for larger devices) I made this for the SF Stupid Shit No One Needs &
Terrible Ideas Hackathon:
[https://stupidhackathon.github.io/](https://stupidhackathon.github.io/)

------
matt_m
Well, I'm not sure a technically impressive hackathon project is a plus past a
certain point.

Not everyone follows the rules of the hackathon and works only during the time
period. I was on a team that was a finalist at one of the startup festivals
and won a few thousand dollars. Talking with the prize sponsor afterwards,
they said something along the lines of "you don't have to pretend you did this
all at the hackathon, I know how these things work". When they realized that
we did, I think they were disappointed!

It worked out for us that time, but in most hackathons they don't have time to
vet all the projects thoroughly, and if you do too much there will be a strong
suspicion that you are cheating and just using it as a pseudo startup pitch
and that can be held against you.

If you want to win, I think the best strategy for productive teams is to do
more than one project since it's hard to know what any particular judge will
like.

Anyway, to answer the question, the most impressive was probably a UI layout
app (Mac) that synced the layout in real time with native iOS and Android apps
using native widgets (this was before react native was popular). Where it was
only a 24 hour hackathon and I ended up doing all 3 apps from scratch. I'm
still pleased about getting horizontal and vertical snap alignment in! I'm
sure the judges (reasonably) thought it was not from scratch but it can be fun
to push once in a while, and people you hack with will know you did it.

It's best not to take it too seriously though. Rather than be impressive, it's
probably better to be creative and do lots of stuff (and have fun too!).

------
drej
We built a bunch of stuff at this non-profit, which would host us every Monday
evening and let us hack away using their data and code. I call this 'recurring
hackathons' and it was the best thing ever, because we got to plan longer
term, we could, but didn't have to, attend regularly, there was collaboration
with an in-house expert, a lot of knowledge sharing, ...

As for regular hackathons... a lot has been said in this thread already.

~~~
snissn
Can you share some examples? I'm also curious about hacking for non-profits

------
runnr_az
Emoji Domain registration: [https://xn--i-7iq.ws](https://xn--i-7iq.ws)

Not particularly popular on HackerNews for whatever reason, it was the type of
thing where I finished my project at 2:00 AM and when I woke up at 6:00 am to
get it together to do my demo, it was already getting tons of traffic.

It got writeups in Fortune, CNET, Lifehacker, and DailyMail over the course of
the next week.

------
drizzzler
[http://fart.watch](http://fart.watch)

------
paddywack12
My team won a bank-sponsored hackathon and a $15,000 prize because 4 days
before it started, I came across this Reddit thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Lightbulb/comments/43ljd4/a_virtual...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lightbulb/comments/43ljd4/a_virtual_pet_that_requires_the_same_level_of/)

We built a tamagotchi-like app called Piggly that would let you feed and take
care of it using money from your bank account. However, instead of treating it
like an in-app purchase, the money goes from your chequing account into
savings or investments (you decide).

The server is still up if anyone would like to try it:
[http://138.68.25.230/](http://138.68.25.230/)

You can Register with any 6 digit number.

~~~
Nadya
Heh, you managed to swing my opinion a 180 in a single sentence.

 _> We built a tamagotchi-like app called Piggly that would let you feed and
take care of it using money from your bank account._

"Wow, that's exploitative as hell. You won't get many players but there are a
few who'd get addicted and basically drain their accounts. Immoral - but
profitable!"

 _> However, instead of treating it like an in-app purchase, the money goes
from your chequing account into savings or investments (you decide)._

"Well, that's just awesome. It encourages people to save by turning it into a
game. If they _really_ end up needing that money they can always move it
back."

Neat idea. I wonder how a bank would react to someone constantly pushing money
between checkings and savings to care for their Piggly without _actually
saving_ as if they had a pet.

------
Cymen
While at Mattermark, I made their Google Chrome extension in a two day
Hackathon. That code was shipped and is right now their current chrome
extension (it looks like there were minor changes since then). In all
fairness, the designer had already done mockups so there wasn't a lot of back
and forth on how it should work.

You can see an animated image of it here:

[https://mattermark.com/browser/](https://mattermark.com/browser/)

I was a bit disappointed we shipped Hackathon code instead of doing it as part
of normal product development. There were issues in the product development
cycle and in reality, the end result was good so such is life.

------
bwasti
[https://github.com/mofarrell/p2pvc](https://github.com/mofarrell/p2pvc)

We made a video chat app that ran in the terminal. Didn't win but went kinda
viral. We later polished it up

------
chrisa
We won first place at an IoT hackathon with a "Smart Locker" project. You
could unlock the locker (via bluetooth) with your phone to check out a piece
of equipment, and the app would show you who had which piece of equipment
checked out.

I wrote up how I built the React Native app part in under 24 hours:
[https://nanohop.com/2017/04/25/how-we-built-a-react-
native-a...](https://nanohop.com/2017/04/25/how-we-built-a-react-native-app-
in-24-hours-and-won-a-hackathon/)

It was really neat seeing the hardware and software come together in only a
day!

------
billconan
An augemented reality app for google glass to learn writing Chinese
characters.

[https://youtu.be/abWyiEY7P-A](https://youtu.be/abWyiEY7P-A)

This won us the first prize for a google glass hackathon.

------
vocatus_gate
Either Tron, a small one-off hacky script I made to automate the annoying
process of cleaning up an infected Windows computer and which unexpectedly
spiraled into a major open-source project:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript](https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript)

or...this bad boy:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/24e5xq/my_proudes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/24e5xq/my_proudest_hack_so_far_multiple_verizon/)

Hideous but it worked.

------
subcosmos
I attended a machine learning hackathon and built a food-recognition model in
caffe that eventually became a mobile food logging app. Discussed here over a
year ago :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712751)

Now that we're in the post SeeFood hotdog/nothotdog era, things have changed
;)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJsOA4Zl6Io](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJsOA4Zl6Io)

------
subsidd
My friend and I built a safety bracelet for women which had a GPS, GPRS chip
and an inbuilt pepperspray which when sprayed triggered an alarm to volunteers
nearby through the app.

------
GroupsOne
Two projects I can name with. 1\. Whatsapp , facebook group finder.
[http://groupsone.com/](http://groupsone.com/) 2\. Chrome extension for Indian
railways tatkal booking website.
[http://www.spotjourney.com/](http://www.spotjourney.com/)

Just love them.

------
sb8244
I never built anything crazy tech-focused at a hackathon, rather focus on a
problem or product idea and flesh it out. This has worked well.

On that note, I would say that using Gimbal beacons to power a walking tour
app was something that people responded really well to. From a tech side, I
had to write some adapters for ionic that I had never done before. It worked
surprisingly well

------
drdre2001
I made a compiler for IBM's Quantum
Computer:[https://github.com/vtomole/aubree](https://github.com/vtomole/aubree).
It's​ my most impressive hackathon project because it's the only one that I
still work on post-hackathon.

------
deathspin
Tinder for Farm Animals

The pitch:
[https://www.facebook.com/brandoncorbin/posts/101552909699924...](https://www.facebook.com/brandoncorbin/posts/10155290969992417)

~~~
glup
Swipe right with your hoof.

------
garysieling
I built a simple code search engine at a Solr conference -
[https://github.com/garysieling/solr-git](https://github.com/garysieling/solr-
git)

------
penteston
I organized in Azerbaijan CTF
[http://ctf.hackathonazerbaijan.org](http://ctf.hackathonazerbaijan.org)

------
gue5t
In general hackathons are based on the idea of programming as producing
objects/products/services (which all decay over time), rather than seeing
programming as the act of codifying understanding of a formal (or informal)
system into an executable representation (which its users continue updating to
match their mental model for as long as they find it useful). The purpose of
many hackathons being "build apps/widgets on top of our service for us!"
presupposes the former view.

Looking at programming this way is harmful to all of us (because it encourages
us to spend time building things designed to decay out from under their users,
or that could be built as contributions to open-source libraries, but which
wouldn't be a "startup idea", "product" or "mvp" anymore), and it would be
nice if folks in this thread took a moment to step back from the things
they've built (which _are_ fun and useful, most of the time!) to think about
working on ideas as contributions to open-source infrastructure libraries
rather than standalone programs or services.

Programming toys is fun; programming universally accessible, near-permanent
extensions to human capability is _exhilarating_.

I'd like to pre-empt the response of "people should be able to write apps and
toys and services if they want!". Of course they can. I just want to make sure
people have considered an alternative point of view, since it's easy to never
step outside apps culture.

~~~
hellofunk
I really disagree. I've participated in a few hackathons and they are among
the best ways to quickly accomplish and learn new things while feeling some of
the joy we all ultimately want from programming. Being able in one day or
weekend to go from scratch to a working prototype is just a great way to kick
yourself into gear and remember what is possible in programming. I've
participated in hackathons for embedded devices and other interesting projects
that I'd not normally pursue, and to show to your friends after only a couple
days some really cool gizmo you built from scratch that does something fun,
well, that's awesome.

Beyond this, hackathons are also great at surrounding yourself by a ton of
knowledge and talent to learn something very very quickly that you might
struggle to learn on your own as quickly.

And finally -- a lot of devs work remotely or alone, and hackathons are
excellent at developing skills of working in a team. And also just getting the
in-person enjoyment of interacting with others who are interested in the same
thing.

A single hackathon is only a day or two. What you get out of it compared to
the time you spent is huge.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
I disagree in that most hackathons aren't "hackathons". They're events where
companies want you to use their product to "advertise" how awesome their
product is to the community. Sure you learn things, but most of the shorter
hackathons, you're learning very very shallow things that you didn't need to
go to a hackathon to know.

------
beeks10
[http://picturap.com/](http://picturap.com/)

