Seems like Indonesian developers are getting a lot of attention from international tech world, and not just to get cheap talents but also the combination of creativity and programming skills. Last year, nobody knows what hackathon is but now there’s one hackathon every 3 months or so.
The latest to bring a hackathon event, is none other than the California-based social networking giant, Facebook. According to The Next Web, Facebook is sending its engineers and evangelists to a world-tour in 12 cities around the globe to get developers to build apps on top of their platform via one of their event called FBWorldHack.
The 12 cities included in the FBWorldHack tour would be Austin, Mexico City, Barcelona, Vancouver, Warsaw, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Taipei, Jakarta, Bangalore and Moscow. Each city has its own registration page, simply click on the city you’re planning to join in to get more information. Attendees will hear talks from the Facebook engineers who will be talking through company APIs, Mobile SDKs and Open Graph.
FBWorldHack is basically a one full day coding events where developers are given time to work on new social apps (individually or teams) with Facebook engineers on hand to support and answer questions. Participants are welcome to arrive with teams already formed, or can plan on meeting other developers day-of and discussing ideas. At the end of the day, participants will demo their app and the best app integrated with Facebook’s platform will be rewarded.
The Jakarta-chapter of the event will be held on Sept 13th and participant will have to register using their Facebook account and answer a few questions related to your programming experience. It seems that Facebook is limiting the number of participants in the event, so they’re filtering based on skills. Participants who are luck enough to pass the filter are also required to pay IDR 236,375 ($25) in order to complete the registration. The venue for the place is, of course, hidden and will be informed later on to the participants.
It’s definitely interesting to see Jakarta on that list, I’m very glad to have our local hackers recognised and appreciated with such flattering event. Although it’s not something new for local developers, the Facebook factor play an important role to attract developers to join the hackathon. Previously, organisations such as NASA, Microsoft, Google, RIM and Nokia has plenty of hackathons all over the country by getting universities to participate. Microsoft and Nokia even got almost a thousand of engineers participating on their hackathon event.
ps : on October 3rd, Foursquare will also host a hackathon event in Jakarta. Developers, prepare yourselves for a serious hack-sessions!
