How a collapsed roof made our best hackathon

Our first hackathon in Córdoba was a hit. 100+ applicants, great devs, co-hosted with a big local company that handled logistics while we figured out what we were doing. It went well. Too well. We got ambitious.

For the second one, "good" wasn't the goal. We wanted people to stop me on the street and tell me about it. We wanted them to go home and rant to their friends about whatever the hell they just experienced. We wanted something memorable enough that the third hackathon would sell itself.

The setup

Córdoba has a decent tech scene. But "decent" isn't "vibrant." We wanted to light that spark.

This time we landed real sponsors (ElevenLabs and v0) which gave us the budget to do something different. And we found the venue: an abandoned colonial-style coworking space. Empty for months. Overgrown garden. Crumbling charm. The second we walked in, we knew. This is it.

The plan wrote itself. A colonial house. A big garden. Argentina. Obviously: asado and empanadas mid-hackathon. Give people a long day (8 AM to 8 PM) but break it up, let them breathe, eat, talk, decompress. We wanted the kind of energy where people actually want to be there at hour ten.

We spent weekends at the house before the event. We cleaned every room ourselves. We cut the grass. We hired a filmmaker because the place was too beautiful not to capture properly. The waitlist filled up, 3x the applicant quality of the first event. Everything was locked in.

Then the sky broke

The night before the hackathon, Córdoba got hit with a biblical storm. And when it rains in Córdoba, it rains. This isn't drizzle. This is "reconsider your life choices" rain.

By morning, the sky cleared. A genuine miracle. We showed up early to set up, already relieved, until we saw the quincho. The covered area where all the final presentations were supposed to happen had its roof caved in overnight. Everything inside: soaked, destroyed, useless.

The rest of the house? Perfect. Functional. Beautiful, even. But no single room could fit 70 people for demos. Because, obviously, colonial houses weren't designed for hackathon presentations.

The hippie pivot

We scrambled. Found a 75-inch TV somewhere. Grabbed a table. Dragged everything into the garden. The demos would happen outside.

It looked like a hippie hackathon. People sitting on grass, demos under the sky.

We thought we'd solved it, until we remembered that outdoor presentations at 8 PM in Argentina means one thing: it's dark. No visibility. No stage lights. Just a glowing TV in a garden full of developers.

It was chaos. It was absurd.

It was probably the most memorable thing we could've done.

What stuck

The outdoor demos in the dark became the moment everyone talks about. Not the sponsors, not the food, not the beautiful venue, the accidental, improvised, slightly ridiculous thing that happened because a roof collapsed.

We're already planning the third one. I have no idea what will go wrong. That's probably the point.