PennApps Mobile 2011, held in Philadelphia this past weekend, was not exactly a death-match-hack-a-thon, but it was a pretty grueling test of mind and body, a competitive coding event in which 31 teams entered and, after 48 hours of coding, just 23 survived.
Organized by the Dining Philosophers, the University of Pennsylvania’s Computer Science club, PennApps Mobile was the latest in a series of such events and Monetate was proud to be a returning sponsor, alongside international brands like Red Bull, Microsoft, Google, plus regional technology vendors such as Comcast and high-tech VC players like First Round Capital, which sponsored the Student Choice Award.
We would like to congratulate all the winners, who will be appearing on the event website as they are announced. But winning is not everything, and there is a lot more information on the PennApps site and Twitter feed than salutes to the winners. Some great resources are posted around these events, including coding tutorials, advice, interviews, and more.
Several Monetate engineers were at the event over the weekend and Monetate CEO David Brussin was very impressed when he stopped in to check out the action. Apart from the coding action, which is inherently interesting to geeks like us–meaning myself and many of the people I work with at Monetate–events like this enable a form of networking that is vital to maintaining a thriving high-tech community such as the one that’s grown up in Philly (BTW, check out David Brussin’s thoughts on starting your tech company outside Silicon Valley).
In the interest of full disclosure, I should also state what might be obvious to some readers: We are hiring and we see events like this as a great way to let local talent know who we are and what we offer (like the chance to earn a very nice paycheck for engaging in hack-a-thons every week).
