[veneratio]

What I like best about this post is the underlying message you can almost miss. Yeah the hackathons are important; we should save them; software engineers need a place to get collaborative together; and making "simply pretty" apps isn't all that awesome. The message getting to me, however, is that software engineers may not be all that great at requirements gathering. We work out improvements to almost every part of our workflow all of the time (e.g. new languages, ides, postures, etc.), but when was the last innovation for requirements gathering?

If there's a major bottleneck in the process, it's probably the disconnect between client and developer. Not that I'm saying this is an easy problem. It certainly isn't. Perhaps we need a bit more focus on this issue than how to create nicer interfaces, though.