But a couple weeks after the initial announcement, Matt Thompson—a respected iOS developer and mobile lead at Heroku, a Salesforce acquisition—wrote a blog post about why people should sign up for this big hackathon. He laid out his arguments about developing for the enterprise, reasons I was more than familiar with since my first startup developed enterprise software and I have seen first hand just how bad the software is that most people have to use to do their jobs.

Matt also mentioned entering the hackathon was now free. This should actually have set off alarm bells, because anyone who was anywhere around the Moscone Center during Dreamforce, can see just how much money is poured into this conference. Why would they charge developers $99 for a chance to add value to Salesforce! To their credit, I believe developers who did pay the $99 to enter were reimbursed.

I started to mull it over and pinged my partner Ben about doing this hackathon together. Ben, like me, was quite skeptical about entering a corporate hackathon. The lure of the prizes at these events is never worth the effort one has to put into these projects. At traditional developer-run hackathons, you join because it’s a chance to work with new technologies in a setting where you can collaborate with others, and it’s damned exciting to build something and to do it under severe constraints. Developers love a good challenge. Winning is much more about the pride of having the best “hack” that could be developed in such a short amount of time—the prizes were just icing.

At corporate-sponsored hackathons, though, the goal is to have developers build on top of the sponsor’s platform and use their APIs. After all, having a platform is useless if there are no developers building for it. Enterprise software has a knack for having terrible usability and their APIs are rarely better. It’s difficult to attract good developers to build on top of shoddy platforms. But then companies figured out that they could get these developers under the guise of a hackathon. They hijacked the goodwill of developers who just want an excuse to build cool stuff.

But I was swayed by Matt’s blog post:

Honestly, if you’re reading this, your chances are probably pretty darn good. If I weren’t an employee (and thus legally prevented from entering), I’d be all over this.

Ben and I figured we can make a nice side project out it, and I had been looking to dive back into iOS anyway—having a deadline will give us some good motivation.