Dozens of programmers gathered together this past weekend in downtown San Francisco to do two things: Celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and collectively pursue the “Ballmer Peak,” the storied state of inebriation at which people supposedly attain “superhuman” coding abilities.
This Saturday night hackathon, held at the PariSoma coworking space and appropriately named “The Ballmer Peak-a-thon,” was created by Originate and sponsored by Twilio. It was the second in what the organizers say will be a series of similar events aimed mostly at giving programmers a place to rock out and hack away with no overt business pressures. The event organizers explicitly state that programmers are meant to play around at making “fart apps,” while business and “idea” guys are turned away at the door, as are tech industry job recruiters.
Needless to say, the whole thing sounds like a lot of fun — so TechCrunch TV stopped by to get a look at the event first hand. Watch the video above to see demos of a few of the margarita-fueled apps that were put together there, and judge for yourself whether the programmers in attendance hit the oh-so-elusive Ballmer Peak.
And here is an embed of the xkcd comic that originated the concept of the “Ballmer Peak” in the first place:
