Last weekend I was invited to the Hack For Change competition / hackathon. It was a real awesome experience. I’ve been to all night hackathons before, but this was different. The reason why it was different is because this one was in San Francisco. The mecca of startup land.

I left home at 4:30AM on Friday morning. The event didn’t start until Saturday morning, but I had an interview that morning with a really cool company. I got there about an hour early though.  They were nice enough to let me work at a desk until my interviewers were ready. The interview went really well, but I didn’t get the job. No problem, I still have a job.

I spent the day in SF walking around checking things out. Had lunch with Jason, visited Engine Yard (nope, they didn’t have a desk for me to work at), and basically wandered around.  It was a pretty good day.

The morning of the hackathon came. I found a place to park my car for the weekend and signed in. Met a few people while waiting for the presentation and ate some breakfast. Several companies presented their APIs to use in the competition.  SimpleGeo, Twilio, and Sunlight Foundation were a few.

After the presentations we paired up into groups to start hacking. I didn’t really have a project to work on, but I had an idea. A few others had similar ideas so we joined and started hacking. The app turned out to be What’s About My City http://mycity.heroku.com. It turned out pretty good. We finished all the features we set out to have in the 24 hours of the competition. It was fully functioning with nothing missing. We even have an iOS app that works with it. It’s pretty awesome.

I worked with Jay, T, and Emerson on the MyCity project. They are awesome. We all worked very well together and had a good time doing it. Emerson and I stayed up all night hacking on the code.

Well, we didn’t win, but we had a great time. I met a lot of really cool people, and picked up a few possible job openings. I stayed up for 36 hours straight, and proved that I still have it.