Reports from the Movable Type Hackathon

Over the past 4 months Six Apart has been working to help its developer and professional community to connect more with one another. That was the primary motivation behind starting the bi-weekly Professional Network phone calls (free to anyone to join in on), as well as why we wanted to host a Movable Type Hackathon here at the Six Apart offices.

It was a great success. Not only did we have a number of Six Apart engineers from the Rojo, Vox and TypePad teams with us, not only did we have several Six Apart partners with us like Socialtext and Technorati, but we had five ProNet members take time off of work to commit a whole day to the event. And then over the course of the rest of the week, other ProNet members were making announcements of the stuff they were working on remotely. What pleases me the most is that the Hackathon did not just produce a single day of hacking, for a single room full of people, but it inspired an even larger number of people to through out the week to do what they love: to build and contribute something to a community they belong to.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we will be profiling the people who participated, and highlighting the contributions they made during what turned out to be a week long Hackathon event through a series of blog posts and podcasts. So check back often, or subscribe to the ProNet blog to learn more about what we all produced, and to learn the answers to some of these burning questions:

• What is Jay Allen’s big news?
• What is Blog Cast?
• What is the best and worst freeway in Los Angeles?
• What new tools are being developed specifically designed for Movable Type developers?
• What’s the dealio with the “Hacking MT” web site?
• What cool new APIs is Socialtext making available to developers?
• If you threw a cell phone at a windshield, which do you think would break first?
• Who was the accidental tourist in Perl Programming Land?
• How will Movable Type and Socialtext be integrating more tightly in SuiteTwo?
• What new technology was Technorati working on while they were here?
• What are some really useful Movable Type plugins you may not have heard about?
• What were all the plugins and tools created during the Hackathon?
• And many many more…