[NathanKP]

The article seems to me to be a highly idealistic look at the Hackathon by someone who is not a hacker. For example, it likens Mr. Jablonowski to a DJ, and makes him seem like a pop star, with people taking pictures with him. It even refers to the "joys of startup life", and while startup life may have a measure of joy, it is mostly a lot of hard work.

Anyway, the article just seems overblown, even cloying to me. I almost expected the author to start gushing about the "rockstar programmers" and "code ninjas" there. If anyone here was actually there, was the atmosphere really as portrayed in this article?

[endtime]

I was there as a tech ambassador. The article exaggerates a bit about Ian, but it was a pretty intense atmosphere. A lot of great companies presented (Foursquare, Twilio, bit.ly, NYT, Dropio, Hunch, MongoDB, and several others) and the participants did build some pretty cool stuff for a single night's work.

It wasn't surreal and it wasn't a Hollywood montage, but there were probably 70-100 participants and a lot of smart people helping out, and a lot of people came up with pretty cool ideas. So while the description of Ian was overblown (and a lot of (intentionally?) misleading language was used, e.g. saying Hilary "warned" people not to disturb Ian as if breaking his concentration would ruin some magical dev process - she was really just reminding everyone that despite having given a presentation, he was a participant, and that there were other people hanging around just to answer questions, so please ask them instead), the event itself was pretty awesome.