What if you could hear from top thought leaders in the dev space from the comfort of your home? You can. We’re thrilled to announce the second annual hack.summit(), a virtual conference taking place the week of February 22, 2016. The event unites renowned programming language creators, open-source contributors and other top experts.

Last year’s hack.summit() had 64,000 registrants, making it the largest virtual conference ever held and the largest programming conference ever created (physical or virtual).

This year, the event is hosted by Pluralsight—the hack.summit() team joined our company back in July, 2015 with the HackHands acquisition. Just like last year, all ticket sales will go to coding nonprofits to help fulfill our mission of raising money for organizations that empower coders.

Tickets are available by donating the amount of your choice to one of our nonprofit partners. If you aren’t in a financial position to donate, then you can help us find more donors by spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter during the registration process, and we’ll give you a free ticket.

All ticket sales from the event are donated to coding non-profits, including Code.org, Women Who Code, Code for America, Black Girls Code and many more. Last year’s event raised $50,000 for nonprofits, and we expect this year’s to raise much more.

Dozens of speakers will present about their experiences in the field, sharing insights and anecdotes to educate and inspire coders of all levels. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with a high-caliber roster of speakers, including:

• David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails)


• Joel Spolsky (Co-founder and CEO of StackOverflow, founder of Trello)


• Thomas Kurian (EVP at Oracle. Oversees all 3000+ of Oracle software products)


• Rebecca Parsons (CTO of Thoughtworks)


• Kent Beck (Created Extreme Programming, created TDD, co-created Agile, authored 9 books)


• Bob Martin (created the Software Craftsmanship Movement)


• Tom Chi (co-created Google Glass)


• Yehuda Katz (Ember.js, JQuery, Rails Core committer. Created HandleBars)


• Jocelyn Goldfein (recent Engineer Director, Facebook)


• Qi Lu (EVP at Microsoft. Oversees R&D for Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Lync, Skype, Bing, Bing MSN, and more)


• Ed Roman (founder of com, Java book author)


• Aaron Skonnard (CEO of Pluralsight)


• Brian Fox (created the GNU Bash Shell, Emacs maintainer)


• Chris Richardson (Java Champion, created the original Cloud Foundry)


• Orion Henry (founder of Heroku)


• Hampton Catlin (Created SaSS, HAML, m.wikipedia.org, and book author)


• Jon Skeet (#1 answerer on StackOverflow)


• Dries Buyataert (created the Drupal programming language)


• Janet Weiner (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert)


• Floyd Marinescu (CEO, InfoQ)


• Nathan Marz (creator of Apache Storm)


• Rod Vagg (Node.js Technical Chair and Core Committer)


• Sarah Allen (Co-creator of After Effects, Flash video, recent Presidential Innovation Fellow)

hack.summit() is truly a rallying cry for the technology industry to gather together and stand for a cause. Oracle, IBM, Facebook, Microsoft, Github, Uber, ThoughtWorks and many other companies have partnered with us to make it a reality. The event’s magnitude is a testament that social entrepreneurship and giving back to the greater good can produce extraordinary results.

Koding’s Global Virtual Hackathon is now part of hack.summit()

We’re also pleased to announce hack.summit() 2016 will also be host to the largest hackathon—virtual or otherwise—which will take place the weekend leading up to the conference, February 20-21.

We’re partnering with Koding.com, a cloud-based development environment and community, to host this hackathon. They organized a similar event last year, where over 60,000 developers registered. Koding.com will provide the technology infrastructure, and subsidize the cost of it, to make the hackathon a reality—taking a stand for our nonprofit partnerships together with Pluralsight.

Hackathon participants can win $150,000 in prizes, which is the largest cash prize in the history of virtual hackathons. Developers will also be helping raise money for nonprofits in the coding space by contributing. This is truly a “hack for good” opportunity for developers worldwide, and we couldn’t be more excited.

More than 30,000 developers from over 900 cities have pre-registered, making it the largest hackathon in history.

We hope you can join us! Check it out at https://hacksummit.org/Hackathon and register for hack.summit() at http://www.hacksummit.org.