Last week I competed in a hackathon at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California and I feel like I’m ready to write about my experience here.

This started in late September. I had been hearing for a few weeks that Facebook recruiters were going to be on campus to hold a hackathon. The idea was intriguing, but I wasn’t all that interested in staying up all night to work on a “hack”. Facebook didn’t seem like the type of company I would like to work for and it didn’t really seem worth my time. Yeah… I was wrong.

A hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. The spirit of a hackathon is to collaboratively build programs and applications. Hackathons are typically between several days and a week in length.

– Wikipedia

I ended up deciding to go to the hackathon at the last minute and met some other people that didn’t have a team. We won. They flew us out to California to compete in the next round of hackathon.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlMVoh5FqFo]

When we got to San Francisco a couple of us took the Caltrain up to San Francisco to see the city. We had to check out Market Street and take in as much of the city as possible – not enough Starbucks. After a couple hours in the city, we got back and the Caltrain and went down to Stanford to check out the campus there.

After that it was food, hackathon, Princeton wins, hotel, food, sleep, plane, home. I had a great time. It was my first trip to California and I can’t wait to go back.