It's Tuesday, and I'm just now recovering from this past weekend, hosting the first standalone Perl Hackathon here in the Chicago area. It's all worth it, though, because by all accounts this hackathon was a smashing success, and I couldn't be happier.

When I first proposed the idea of a standalone hackathon, it was met with guarded optimism from the Perl Foundation steering committee. We thought about what goals we'd set, and decided that with something so new, we'd be foolish to set ourselves up for disappointment. I suckered veteran YAPC::NA 2006 organizer Pete Krawczyk into helping pull things together, and our planning was underway.

Fast forward to early November 2006. We had everything in order, already had a good number of sign-ups at first, and they kept on showing up. We had set up a page on the hackathon wiki for attendees to sign up, and the number of
I decided to It went better than I expected, although for a first time hackathon, I would have been happy if three people showed up. Instead, we had about 15 on Friday, 30 on Saturday, and 15 on Sunday.

It wasn't all about the number of people, either.