Several weeks ago I was invited to be a technical leader at Scripted Hackathon. At the time, I hadn’t fully realized what I was getting into, or why I was even being invited - I had almost forgotten that I had met Emily and Rebecca from Scripted SF months ago at a pair programming meetup. I had jived with their organization’s objective - getting kids involved early in their lives in programming, through classes, tutoring, and events such as this hackathon.

First thing that struck me when I showed up to the Mozilla office in downtown San Francisco at a bright and early 8am on a Saturday was the incredible level of organization. They had everything locked down. Usually at hackathon type events, things are a horrible, barely functioning, potentially dangerous mess. To be fair, this event wasn’t too big, but everything worked like a well oiled machine. Greeted, given a tshirt and ID, and told exactly where to get the donuts. Smooth.