I was at the BattleHack in Berlin. The event itself was absolutely fantastic. It was definitely the best organized hackathon I've ever been part of. Still, t

I was at the BattleHack in Berlin. The event itself was absolutely fantastic. It was definitely the best organized hackathon I've ever been part of. Still, the final results felt similarly weird. The winner was a (non-technical) dude who had been pitching his startup for months already and found himself an amazingly talented developer at the hackathon. They made use of most of the sponsor APIs and added PayPal as a payment option for the already existing service. To me it felt like the guy was just going to random hackathons so he could get work done on his website for free. Even though the developer seemed to be exceptionally good, it seemed like he was just being taken advantage of by a guy who couldn't get his startup to have more traction. There were definitely much more impressive hacks out there. (Mine honestly wasn't one of them, so it's not just jealousy talking). In addition, the theme of the hackathon was 'solving local problems'. Now if not having a platform to get product X in city Y is a local problem, it might fit. For me though, the interpretation was more 'making the world a better place' and not 'building a purely profit-oriented application to sell stuff using PayPal'. I think they simply chose the most monetizable product that was in the competition. Made the whole event, which, I repeat, was about the best organized and executed hackathon I've ever seen, suddenly feel cheap.