Hackathons seem to be where companies can dump an untested implementation of a platform without ruining the experience of actual customers. They can either find

Hackathons seem to be where companies can dump an untested implementation of a platform without ruining the experience of actual customers. They can either find out what's wrong with their platform or be pleasantly surprised when someone manages to use it. A few years ago I ended up at a Hadoop-themed hackathon. It took most of the day for the organizers to provision us servers running Hadoop that could compute anything non-trivial. The only reason my team ended up with something instead of nothing is because I SSHed to my desktop computer to do the actual computation.