[frabcus]

The early ones did have serious programmers at them.

My first memory of one is Yahoo using it to get people to use its API in London, about 10 years ago. That was when a web API with major data behind it was an important new thing. The openness was quite radical, and linked somewhat to the open source movement.

We (ScraperWiki, Rewired State...) did a bunch of hack days for mainly philanthropic purposes - democracy, journalism and so on. More recently DataKind does that even better.

Now though it has become so mainstream, there are hackdays everywhere. They're being driven even more by marketing, rather than coding. The original purpose feels lost.

There'll be something else next.