A couple of months ago, around July or August, when posters of TechCrunch Disrupt 2017 started showing up on the Berlin walls, right between Angela Merkel’s and Marilyn Manson’s I was really excited. Not for the conference itself, ’cause ain’t nobody got money fo’ that, but for the attached hackathon, which is always a great event, with awesome sponsors and some of Berlin’s best hackers attending.

10 minutes later I pulled up my laptop and hit Disrupt’s homepage, prepared to secure my ticket for the hackathon.

Early bird gets the worm, right?

10 more minutes and that excitement was dead, killed by TC’s empty hackathon page. No details, no tickets, nothing.

So i did what anybody would’ve done. I tweeted about it.

Nobody replied, and I’ve slowly forgot about it for a few weeks.

Until, some days ago, news of the hackathon re-emerged in my feed, this time with a bit more details.

Again excitement, “let me get some of that sweet tickets” attitude and again, 2 minutes later bitter disappointment. Goddammit TechCrunch!

The tickets were to be offered at random times, in batches. “Just watch our Twitter account!”

Ugh. These tickets are harder to get than Hamilton tickets.

How about instead of subscribing to all your Twitter updates, I build a small and beautiful bot that will stream all your tweets, just waiting for the right one. And when that happens, I’ll just send myself an email. Easy peasy.

So that’s what I did. 30 minutes later a Node.js script was running in my terminal, keeping an eye on TC’s Twitter account for me.

Pretty terminal Twitter client

I stepped back, I gazed upon the beauty of this and thought to myself “I bet there’s a whole lot of other people that have this same exact issue. Time to make it public”.

30 more minutes, thanks to the awesome carrd.co, I had a landing page with an email subscription form.

Awesome looks, right?

As a parenthesis here, I couldn’t be happier with Carrd.co, on my commute to work I was editing the landing page from my phone and it was so cool, so easy to use. God bless @ajlkn. He’s making the web great again.

Namecheap was happy to provide me with a cheap name and about 1h later, the did was done.

GetMeToTheHackathon.co

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If you got questions or any ideas how could I make this better, tweet or DM @Maephisto.