I had the privilege of being a judge this year. An extremely interesting takeaway from this competition is the changing climate of web technologies/design every

I had the privilege of being a judge this year. An extremely interesting takeaway from this competition is the changing climate of web technologies/design every year. I was a participant in the competition two years ago and the level of complexity and refinement of the websites was not really close to this year's overall. Two years ago, the focus was very much on building and clean HTML5 sites without much other emphasis. Now, Bootstrap has helped the generally design-lacking MIT students put some shine on their websites, and tools like node.js and Backbone are making more rich, real-time applications much easier to build. From seeing the difference in two years, it's clear how important open source technologies are for helping people push the boundaries of what the web is capable of with less effort than ever. Of course, many of these things existed just two years ago as well, but improved projects and exposure is helping move things forward.