Welcome Meteor developers!

If you were with us on Meteor Day last year, you remember the excitement as we celebrated the release of Meteor 1.0. I'm thrilled to tell you that we’re planning on bringing the worldwide community together again this fall for a global distributed hackathon.

This distributed hackathon, taking place over the weekend of October 10th and 11th, will have chapters working out of our meetups all around the world, but you're also free to work from home or your favorite coffee shop with other developers from anywhere in the world.

It'll be a great chance to work with fellow Meteorites, share awesome apps, and communicate with other meetup groups about Meteor. Whether you're an experienced Meteor developer or just looking to get started, we hope you can join us.

If you want to participate but haven't had any luck finding a teammate yet, tweet your idea with #meteorteammate.

Join an event

Many of our meetup groups will be hosting in-person hack sessions on Saturday, October 10th. As anyone who attended at meetup on Meteor Day last year can tell you, getting a chance to meet other Meteor developers in your area is a delight, so attend if you can. If you'd like to attend one in person, find your local meetup here.

Special Offers during this Hackathon

Kadira

Normally, Hackathon apps are not built for performance. But what happens if your app gets popular and it can't handle the load?

So, it's a good idea to look at the performance of your app from the start. But, you shouldn’t spend too much time on that. That's where we are going to help you:

* Free access to BulletProof Meteor - Learn what you need to know about Meteor and Performance. (You can complete the basic section in less than 3 hours, then continue as you need)

* Free access to Meteor Explained - It's a good idea to learn what's really going inside Meteor.

* Full access to Kadira APM. (Load test your app before submitting it - Kadira will help you)

> To get Full access to Kadira, drop us an email: support@kadira.io

We hope you'll find these resources helpful. If you've got any questions, just post it on the Meteor Forums. The kadira team is super excited to help you guys.

Sandstorm.io

We want your app to shine! So we're offering design office hours for any team who packages their app for the Sandstorm server app ecosystem.

What we're offering:
* 2x30min Design Office Hours with Sandstorm Designer Nena Nguyen. Discuss your vision for graphics, icons, or logos you'll need for your app in the first session, and follow-up in the second session.

* One free year of Oasis, Sandstorm’s managed hosting, for every team member, at the Mega tier ($288 value). Great for private git hosting, document collaboration, or host any open source app you want, with built-in access control and sharing

* Keybase.io invite from Jade. Keybase.io is a website for helping people send encrypted & signed messages to each other. The Sandstorm App Market relies on it, so if you need an invite, Jade will give one to you!

About Sandstorm.io: Sandstorm is a user-friendly platform for deploying and managing instances of web applications on your personal server. It's like Google Apps For Your Domain, but anyone can write an app, and Sandstorm makes it easy and secure to deploy. People can choose to install Sandstorm on their own Linux box or use the hosted service at oasis.sandstorm.io.

Check out the demo: https://demo.sandstorm.io

Since Sandstorm has built-in multi-instance, sharing, and access control, that means a lot less work to do in 24 hours.

Useful.io

Don't have a meetup to go to for the Hackathon? Don't worry! This October 10th Useful IO team members will be online and available to answer questions and help you troubleshoot dev problems on your epic hackathon mission. We've been writing and deploying Meteor apps since 2013, have benefited a lot from the community that's grown up around our favorite technology, and this is our way of giving back. For exact hours and details, go here.

Meteor Toys

Meteor Toys will be offering free access to their development tools during the hackathon. They will award free licenses to the winning teams of "Top Five Overall Submissions", and to three teams they select for "Most Interesting Use of ToyKit," the SDK for building your own Meteor Toys. For more details, click here.

Eligibility

Teams can consist of anywhere between 1-4 people.

Also (optionally), you should tweet about what you're budilding during the hackathon using #builtwithmeteor!

Requirements

Submissions to be considered for prizes must include the following:

A github repo with app code
A demo video not to exceed 1:30 (you can record this using quicktime - here's a helpful video!)
A list of packages used to create the app

Prizes

$16,730 in prizes

One Year Subscription to Galaxy (2)

Galaxy is Meteor's commercial service for operating and managing meteor applications on the cloud. You can learn more here: http://info.meteor.com/blog/announcing-meteor-galaxy.

This prize will be awarded to the top overall app as determined by our judges, as well as the app that wins the public voting.

One Month Trial of Galaxy (4)

The teams that finished 2nd and 3rd in both our judged competition and the public vote will win a one month trial to Galaxy, Meteor's commercial service for running applications in the could.