I took part in Startup Weekend Newcastle earlier this year in the first one outside of London or Cambridge in the UK. While I loved the event it frustrated me

I took part in Startup Weekend Newcastle earlier this year in the first one outside of London or Cambridge in the UK. While I loved the event it frustrated me how the focus of the weekend seemed to be as far away from technical as possible. My team involved 4 developers so we wanted to make sure we could build something in the weekend. We built instaquote.co and didn't place in the final results, what annoyed us the most was the fact we were the ONLY team with a MVP/prototype. We 'hacked' our website up and there were times when we found ourselves employed as official VPN guy and official LastFM DJ!! The winning team had the idea of a online video CV, they won on the premise that they had a BBC interview lined up(didn't happen) and a big customer from the city(didn't happen/they had connections there {family}). Needless to say we were pretty annoyed at the non technical attitude, probably due to the fact Newcastle has about 20 developers who don't call themselves a web guru while only knowing HTML. BUT by far the best thing to come out of the weekend was the guys I met, I'm still friends and keep in touch to this day and have even started a project with one of my team members! It's about the people you meet IMHO. Have a great time and I'm sure you will find your role!