It was a good hackathon.
I am happy for the winners.
The truth of the matter is, there were so many entries, that it was a complete lottery who ended up winning. I personally thought our app was great, and had a decent shot at winning, but I went to bed assuming 99% odds we wouldn't get picked. With that many entries the odds were not that great.
As lame as this sounds, I've learned the way to really win at Hackathons is to build something you wanted to build anyway. That way, if you win, it's a nice bonus, but you'll come out ahead no matter what.
The judging processes in these things is always suboptimal. I knew it was going to be a nightmare to try and narrow down that many entries to 5 in just a few hours. They were very optimistic in thinking they could pull that off. I think ChallengePost has a great opportunity to improve here by innovating so that if you enter a Hackathon, you get direct feedback from the judges (either quantitative numerical feedback or qualitative comments), so you get some acknowledgement for the hard work put in. The judging was indeed very light--as another data point I don't think we got a single hit on our app-- but I thought they tried to do something unprecedented and did a decent enough job and can learn going forward.
It was a very cool event, I'm happy for the winners, and hopefully some of these Hackathon software tools like ChallengePost and HackerLeague can continue to get better and help alleviate some of these transparency concerns for future Hackathons.
I would definitely recommend participating in future Salesforce Hackathons.