[spullara]

...said by someone that is no good at hackathons. :)

Honestly though, hack on something you can finish in a few hours and go home and come back the next day to tell people about it. I'm still running twickery.com from the last F8 opengraph hackathon I went to. Spent a few hours and still use it now.

Hackathons give you an excuse to scratch an itch, learn something new and challenge yourself.

[thisone]

I find it odd that internal motivation could be so low that someone would need to wait for an external motivation, like a hackathon, in order to do something they wanted to do, like learn something new or challenge themselves.

[petercooper]

Sometimes it's about having an excuse to make the time. I like the idea of building small games but I can never find the time until I specifically book a weekend "off" to do Ludum Dare.