Hacker News Reader

I got baited into going to one of those once. I was promised the prospect of spending a dozen hours with friends building something cool, but halfway through I realized we were just doing free labor for one of Latin America's biggest banks and just left.

I'm still longing for events where my friends and I can gather to build something cool, and game jams are the closest I ever got to that.

View on HN

+1 had a fun Node Knockout experience many years ago making a game with 3 friends. We had a game artist / sound designer, and two engineers with chops on the front-end and back-end.

Node knockout and rails rumble before that. :)

In which the Judges have to actually try out the submission instead of listening to people go through a slide deck on a video.

I think most of the creative energy of building things quickly rightly goes into game jams because they offer the potential of UX creativity, rapid iteration and a joyous product at the end. Coding up a web app can be fun but the output product is almost always business-y and I'd much rather play a dozen games in order to vote, than blank-slate setup a bunch of web apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com