I want to spend a few minutes sharing my thoughts about hacker culture, hackathon culture, and why there is a divide between the two. First, a brief introduction to what these things are. “Hacker culture” is a mentality of using technology in new, often unconventional ways. It comes out of the original computer science groups at universities such as MIT and UC Berkeley. As far as I can tell, in the earliest days, before the internet, most of these groups had separate cultures.