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Why have a virtual hackathon

The following is a guest blog post from Koding’s Chief Business Officer, Nitin Gupta. 

Hackathons are a way for creative teams to solve difficult problems in a very short amount of time.
However, the challenge with most traditional hackathons is that they require you to be physically present at a location. With more and more of our lives moving online, why be tied to a location to solve problems? This was the genesis of the idea behind Koding’s Global Virtual Hackathon. The event is scheduled for Dec 6-7th, 2014.

Since the announcement of the event less than a month ago, the global developer community has whole-heartedly adopted the idea and expressed keen interest to participate. As of the writing of this post, more than 30,000 software developers (represented by over 10,000 teams) from all over the world have applied to be a part of the event and the number is growing rapidly every day. The participants span from Iceland to New Zealand and everywhere in between, making it a truly global hackathon. Seeing the event applications grow exponentially , Koding’s CEO, Devrim Yasar, remarked, “Apparently, a virtual hackathon was just the right catalyst to get the global software developer community excited about showcasing their skills. This presents a huge learning and collaboration opportunity both for software developers and for companies who are building APIs and applications aimed at developers worldwide.”

Not only has Koding seen tremendous interest from the the global developer community, we’ve also seen keen interest from partners like Intuit, Turkcell, Imgur, Sprintly, Datadog, Mashape, nginx, PubNub, Elance-ODesk, Paypal, 3Scale, APITools and DigitalOcean. All of these companies have contributed to a total prize pot of over $35,000!

With the virtual hackathon, Koding’s vision is to create an event that would be available to everyone irrespective of location, sex, age, compute power, etc. Not everyone lives in a city that provides and nurtures technology the way Silicon Valley does. This event will give anyone, anywhere an opportunity to share their skills with the world and be recognized. So it does not matter if you are an individual in a remote part of the world or someone who lives down the street from Koding’s office…everyone can participate, have fun and demonstrate their creativity.

 What is Koding?

The Koding platform provides all you need to move your software development to the cloud. You will be up and running in minutes on your own cloud-based Linux boxes where you can learn programming languages like Ruby, Go, Java, NodeJS, PHP, C, C++, Perl, Python… the list goes on! Koding gives you a browser-based Web IDE and Terminal and also allows you to share your session easily with your friends, classmates and colleagues. All Koding virtual machines come with full root access and public IPs so you are not hindered in any way. Signup is easy and free.


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