I'm a Hacker and a Dad, and I rarely get to Hackathons unless I'm randomly there by chance. That happens often enough that I have an opinion about Hackathons,

I'm a Hacker and a Dad, and I rarely get to Hackathons unless I'm randomly there by chance. That happens often enough that I have an opinion about Hackathons, only because I am a frequent attender of Hackerspaces. As a Dad, my time is very valuable; my kids do not suffer for my nerdy nature. In fact, my first hackerspace is the one I share with the boys. The second hackerspace is Metalab (http://metalab.at/ http://metalab.at/), and I'm a social attender - i.e. I don't really commit, but rather just attend. To be honest, after a week of watching the 5 and 7 year olds, its a great thing to see the 20-something year olds, the 30-something year olds, and maybe even a few teens, hacking away on something in the social cornucopia that is your average, every day Hackerspace. Here in Vienna, I sometimes run into other hacker-Dad's, and one for one either have other commitments, socially borne, and therefore they are mutable, or else they have the long-term view. What matters though, is that all of these hacker-Dads share the desire to pass it on. Its a wonderful thing indeed to see a 4 or 5 or 6-year generation doing amazing things with the end-results of their Dads (or Mums) few hours spent, here and there, soldering .. hacking .. tweaking .. twiddling. tl;dr :- Home is the first hackerspace, or at least it should be.