I've noticed the number of "hackathons" lately has been escalating.

I wanted to rant about it, but Ryan Carson does a better job:

Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Next time someone asks if you want to crash at their hacker mansion for the summer (which has a ppol, BBQ and pool table!) or team up for a 24-hour hackathon, think twice. They’re probably just trying to cash in on your youth and optimism.

Non-engineers need to stop exploiting engineers with hackathons.

And while we're at it, stop mentioning hacker mansions in your job posts if you want us to have any respect for you. (YCombinator companies, I'm looking at you!)

Singly's first hackathon was a huge success:

We learned how much beer is too much. Four kegs, we learned, is too much beer.

We spent the weekend gathering feedback from every attendee, and have just now finished distilling it. We learned what people would like to see from Singly. That said, we also learned that people think Singly is pretty powerful already.

We locked in an all-star panel of judges, including Om Malik. We found beautiful venues, thanks to True Ventures and 780 Cafe. We brought our developer docs up to speed. We bought a dozen r/c helicopters to give away. We booked a videographer. We got catering and bought kegs. We hired an army of TaskRabbits. We designed fancier swag. Then, we just needed to get 100 smart, ambitious developers and designers to show up.

Partnering with Geekli.st and Path.to helped. Both contacted their wide networks. They also got an article on HackerNews, which helped.