Thunderbolt Labs Hackathon’ed in Baltimore

How does a developer or designer improve their craft? Most just practice constantly. How do you know if really have what it takes to deliver something workable in the shortest amount of time possibly? You participate in a hackathon.

Hackathons are becoming more prevalent. At Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Facebook’s legendary events, some of the great projects that have changed the way we use and view technology have been created. Usually these projects are fabricated under a caffeine and pizza induced buzz over a weekend. While these events are a big ticket out in The Valley, they are starting to catch on all over the place. This weekend, we had the pleasure of continuing the tradition of the hackathon by helping to sponsor and competing at the Baltimore Hackathon. Baltimore isn’t known for these types of events, but the tech community is strong and is starting to grow at a rapid pace.

A special thing about Baltimore is the diversity of the tech crowd’s interests. There are some serious designer types, coupled with serious developer types, and more than few hardware hackers. This weekend they all convened at AOL’s Advertising.com Baltimore office to show off their best talents. Even though this was a competition with cash prizes, the amount of camaraderie was high, and people were keen to show off their creations and help with others. The food was impressive as well. The entire event was catered by a local burger joint.

Thunderbolt Labs was honored to be one of the sponsors, along with Northrop Grumman, Looking Glass, Advertising.com, Paypal, Code for America and smart logic. Together with the other sponsors, we are were able to raise the cash prizes to $600.

At Thunderbolt Labs, we enjoy the hackathon culture. We also enjoy the type of developers who have the courage to create a working project in a short time. The lessons learned from having to deliver something of value, that actually works, in a short amount of time carries over to our weekday projects. We also enjoy the relationships created as you work as a team creating projects together. We look forward to doing this again.