Caffeine, Pizza And Glory: The TechCrunch Hack Day At Disrupt

Hack Days, for those of you not aware, are gatherings of hackers who work alone or in small teams and build software out of publicly available APIs. Or, in the case of Scrapyard Challenges, electronic devices out of discarded electronic “junk.” I’m an expert hardware hacker, myself, by the way.

We’re adding a Hack Day to our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York later this month. We’ve got pizza, Red Bull and everything else you’ll need to build your stuff. All we need now are 200 or so Hackers. This is both a software and Hardware hack event, and we’re partnering with Scrapyard Challenge for the hardware portion.

The event is free and is being held over the weekend before Disrupt, beginning Saturday afternoon. Projects will be shown on stage on late Sunday, and a variety of awards will be given. If you finish a project you’ll get into the main Disrupt conference for free, saving you $3,000. And at least two of the top projects from the Hack Day will be shown on stage in front of the entire Disrupt event audience of 2,000 or so people on Wednesday, May 26.

More details are here, and the application form is here. Both software and hardware hackers are welcome. This event is free for hackers.

The event is sponsored by Facebook (thank them for the free tickets and food). More sponsors will be announced shortly.

The TechCrunch Hack Day is being organized by four hard core hackers: Chad Dickerson (who held the first Hack Days at Yahoo, now CTO of Etsy), Daniel Raffel (Yahoo) and Tarikh Korula (Uncommon Projects) and Jonah Brucker-Cohen (Scrapyard Challenge). They’ll be organizing and attending the event to make sure everything is Hacker Shangri La all the way.

If you’re press and want to attend the Hack Day portion of the event, please contact us. You just have to promise not to get in their way. Highly caffeinated hackers under time pressure should not be pestered. Interested sponsors get in touch here.