Concerning Hackers and Beaches

For the uninitiated, Hackerbeach involves a group of hackers (historically 15-20) gathering in a tropical location for a month to hack on various open source projects. It can be thought of as a month-long hackathon or code sprint for nomadic open source developers. All of the code so far has been focused on the open web ecosystem.

Last year it took place on a small island of Vietnam named Phú Quốc. It was a loosely organized event with no set dates (besides the month of January). Hackers from all around the world showed up, found places to stay, rented motorbikes, and met up at coffee shops for coworking in paradise.

In the evenings we got together and went out on events like fishing trips, snorkeling, motorbike trips through the national park, trips to the local night market, visited local temples, attended (and karaoke-participated in) a wedding, and other fun goodness. Many of the events were immortalized in the photos available on the flickr group.

During the day, some of the projects created or worked on last year included:

Previously we kept a blog documenting some of the events that happened and project development updates. We even held a FirefoxOS App Day wherein all the attendees created FirefoxOS apps for the software they were developing. In many cases, these were submitted to the Firefox Marketplace. We even created a Hackerbeach Map webapp and had that included. It was a crowdsourced map about all the coffee shops, roadside attractions, places with wifi to work from, and other points of interest.