Hackathons are––for the uninitiated––a little insane, and HTN one of the craziest among them. 1,000 students from all across the globe (literally!) descend on Waterloo, Ontario for a 36-contiguous-hour event to build a team and create interesting software. While students might be motivated by prizes awarded in cash, pride, swag, and lucrative employment opportunities––it feels like most of all, students are eager to learn about new technologies and show what they can do in a day and a half.

If you’re a fan of DigitalOcean and its powerful but simple platform to deploy cloud-based infrastructure, you’ll appreciate CockroachDB: it’s similarly simple to deploy and provides your stack a lot of power and flexibility. And while CockroachDB can be deployed anywhere, it’s a natural fit within DigitalOcean’s no-fuss framework: both are for developers who like easy-to-reason-about technology that lets them get work done quickly.