I was on Hawaii Public Radio to talk about our Stupid Hackathon Hawaii

Thanks again to Burt Lum and Ryan Ozawa for having me and my buddy Ray on their radio show, Bytemark’s Cafe, to talk about the Stupid Shit and Terrible Ideas That No One in Hawaii Needs “Hackathon”.  I had a chance to sit down and to discuss why Ray and I are hosting this event, and to get the tech community in Hawaii excited about our shitty hackathon.

Joe Karlsson on HPRs Bytemarks Cafe

Ray and I stole the idea for the hackathon from the original Stupid Hackathon in New York. We loved the work their team did and wanted to bring that hacker anarchist fun down to Hawaii. When we went on air, we wanted to make it clear that we putting this event on just for the LOLz. There are no corporate sponsors, we aren’t trying to sell some shitty product, we are trying to solve a massive problem in 48 hours, we are just trying to build stupid shit together with friends, and have some fun.

As a developer, Ray and I go to a new hackathon about once or twice a month. I love going to these hackathons because it is an opportunity to do my favorite thing, building software. However, I find that at most hackathons that I attend, it is sponsored by an organization that is trying to get free development work or to get devs to start using some shitty product, or to recruit new devs to their company. This is all fine, but we wanted to provide something new to the tech scene down here in Hawaii. Hence the Stupid Shit Hackathon was born.

Our hackathon was on January 7th, 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaii. You can check out the submissions on our website. We had some awesome/shitty submissions.

You can listen to the original broadcast on the HPR’s Bytemarks Cafe website. I go on at the 11-minute mark.