TL;DR – Next Hack & Tell is on October 17th, 2015 at 9am. Sign up here

Last October, we decided we didn’t want to go to hackathons anymore. It seemed the local events were becoming more and more focused on creating a startup over a weekend and seeing who has the most customers by the end. These are all well and good, but can be a painful experience for people who show up to make things. I published a blog post about this a while ago trying to explain why those events are toxic for the programmers, designers, and engineers who show up.

Even though we had stopped going to hackathons, we were still building all sorts of stuff in our free time. The love of seeing what other people were fiddling on kept getting stronger and stronger though, so we decided to throw our own party.

We’ve now hosted 4 events over the past year:

and we are in preparation mode for the 5th.

Over the course of hosting these events, we’ve had 33 different projects presented with massively varying levels of “business value.” We’ve seen video games, a quilt pattern generator, home automation tools, GIF generators, resume websites, a mobile app that puts space-colored beards on people, and many many others. The one thing all of the projects have is unbridled excitement from the person making them.

I can’t count how many times an attendee has told me that they are at their first hackathon, or that they decided to learn something entirely new that day. I’ve even seen people spend their entire saturday teaching strangers how to program. It is not very common for a student learning how to write HTML to place in the top 3 projects at a programming competition, and thats why RokkinCat is going to keep hosting these events.

So come to our next hack & tell on October 17th, its free, there is free food, and people are going to be nice to you.

http://www.rokkincat.com/hack-n-tell