What has in common a chateau from the 16th century with a bunch of geeks? At first look probably nothing, but if come closer to the door of the original baroque castle, you will meet people who came here to program and quite possibly even learn something new. Technical presentations, great people and a good mood. Welcome to the first Pilsen hackathon.

The entire event was held in the spirit of web technologies, mainly cloud. This is the world of HTML5, Node.js, CoffeeScript, OpenShift, Apiary.io, MongoDB, jQuery or WebSockets. At the hackathon beginning there waited for all participants a brief introduction of some web technologies in the form of a short presentation.

Gradually it becomes clear who wants which technology to work on and teams are slowly formed and first projects as well. Among the ideas there is a game or a web browser extension. It's Friday evening and most of the participants are passionately devoted to discussions about API use. And of course, with a beer or maybe two

Saturday morning - Programming marathon starts at full blast. Local IRC channel, Github, StackOverflow, various APIs but also tee, juice, cola, energy drinks and coffee - lots of coffee. The room early looks like in the hive. Ideas are flying through the air and all participants are deeply engaged in their code. All the time, what a friendly atmosphere here and the teams help each other. The goal is to create something new in a technology that interests me. Who says geeks are antisocial beings who stay hidden somewhere in the darkness with their computers, do not believe them. Everyone is trying to help the person who needs it, and to teach others what they know. Really, there is not a lack of awkward issues.

Sunday - day of the settlement. Each team has exactly three minutes to present their results. Hard limit for everyone, without exception, even though the code was edited during all night and last commits were pushed at six o'clock in the morning. The exhaustion is already visible but the results are stunning. And although some project failed to finish, everyone deserves our big admiration. It was not about winning. We came here to learn, try new things, to know who all in Pilsen is working in this area of technologies and the project evaluation was maybe even irrelevant. Actually, I wonder if this programming event is not an excuse to hang out with a bunch of friends, not even for the beer. :-)

It remains to thank everyone involved. Organizing team of Kerio, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and FlexiBee supported by our partners Apiary.io, Red Hat and Socialbakers.

And when I said that the event have involved such wonderful people, I mean it literally. You can find them on our Github repository, on Twitter, or even better - next time come straight and get to know them too!

• Official event website
• Github repository for all projects
• Photos on Google+
• @HackatonPlzen Twitter account
• #plzenskyhackathon hashtag

And if you can read in Czech, don't forget to read a blog post from Tomas Dvorak - one of our participants.