Hacking on Rd.io at Spotify - Sponsor APIs

This is part of my experience when I attended the Spotify NYC hackathon, way back in the day.

From my TechCrunch Disrupt NYC experience, building on an event sponsor’s API improves my chance of “winning” anything at the hackathon. I may have the best idea for a business, hackathons were events for tech companies to market their APIs. Sponsors with APIs always had a prize to give at the event.

When I hacked on EverNote at Disrupt NYC, I learned quickly that even if a company has an API and sponsored the event, if they did not have a developer evangelist there, I would have a hard time figuring out their API, even with API keys and documentation.

There’s nothing like stepping through a system with another person interactively answering any questions you have.

This is another rule I have when attending hackathons - hack on sponsor’s APIs to learn about their APIs and help them improve them with whatever I can create.

Being comfortable is really important!