How a tweet caused a late night cross-continent Twitter based hackathon

Fred Rivett
Makers Gonna Make
Published in
2 min readJan 29, 2016

Last night didn’t go to plan at all.

It all started with a tweet from Casey, followed by a tweet from Ryan, followed by a tweet from Ben, which sparked a spontaneous late night, cross-continent hackathon.

When I arrived home late last night I didn’t expect to be up until 3:30am, and didn’t expect to be launching a new site on Product Hunt. But that’s the joy of the maker community. Ideas can form and be shipped in less than 24 hours. And that’s exactly what happened.

It all started with a tweet 🐦

Thanks Casey 👊

The team at Product Hunt were already on it 👻

👻

Jonas jumped in and proposed a hackathon 🗣

And jsneedles had the domain 🌐

After some chat on the how, Jeff agreed to get it done 💥

Then Ben looped Daniel & me in 👀

#BlameBenTossell

I initially was hesitant, considering I don’t consider myself a ‘proper’ designer, plus the fact it was 11pm and I had work the next day. But I can’t resist a good hackathon, and an idea for the UI popped into my head. At that point I knew I was in 🙌

Who can resist a hackathon?

Initial logo followed swiftly half an hour later 😼

Followed by a bit of fun manipulating everyone’s favourite cat 🙀

Your glasses are a little off, friend

Free vector art grabbed, colour scheme was now in place 👌

The design became a thing 🚀

Thanks Niv 🙌
T-shirts requested. Well that escalated quickly.

A quick, simple UI was hacked together 🏃💨

Spin up that new project
We were almost 3 hours in by now

Give us the comments 💬

Slap a footer on it 👣

A link to the twitter stream that started it all was added 🔗

Aaand then it was live 💃

Aaaand breathe.

Niv saying what we’re all thinking…

Big thanks to jsneedles, Casey, Ben, Ryan, Jonas, Daniel & Niv for the inspiration/help/work/direction, let’s do this again sometime 🙌

Interested in learning to ship projects? I’m co-writing a book on the topic, sign up to hear when it’s ready.

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Fred Rivett
Makers Gonna Make

Developer 👨‍💻 • Hobbyist designer 🎨 • Maker 🛠 • Runner 🏃‍♂️ • Explorer 🌍