An Illustrated Slice Of TC Disrupt Hackathon Life

Pizza has just arrived for the second time (!) here at the TC Disrupt Hackathon in the San Francisco Design Center Concourse and it’s finally cooled down after one of the hottest days we’ve experienced in San Francisco in awhile.

I’ve been here for about seven hours and met some great and incredibly nerdy folks. Some of us are working hard, some of us are hardly working and some of us are already asleep at 8:00 PM PST (luckily AirBnb has provided an air mattress for those brave enough to crash in front of hundreds of people). Around 400 people coders and fans of coders have shown up for TechCrunch’s Hackathon and it seems as though a good proportion have come ready to stare at their computer screens and eat carbs for about 24 hours. Aside from pizza, there’s lots of Red Bull and Diet Coke, or as I like to call it, cold carbonated coffee.

While roaming around taking pics I’ve met a slew of Groupon clones, Andrew Le Blanc, who is making an “engine to be able to see evolution happening in realtime,” Endorsey, a team working on a shopping recommendation for friends, a group working on “Pitch Hero,” a platform that allows you to get realtime feedback on your presentations, a guy building a “StumbleUpon for your Twitter stream,” and so on and so forth. TC Disrupt NY Hackathon darlings Groupme are here, sitting coding away on live size bags of Pop Chips. NYC Disrupt alums Flymodo, an app that allows you to track flights via Twitter, are also roaming the premises and were lucky enough to catch the ear of Mike Arrington himself.

Meanwhile there’s a guy making iPad paintings, and a team (Urbanspoils) working entirely on an idea suggested by our very own Erick Schonfeld early on in the Hackathon, a product that offers secret Groupons, available only to people who check certain venues in on Foursquare.

iPhone snapshots of some of my favorite moments, below.