The Boulder Civic Hackfest is being organized in conjunction with the National Day of Civic Hacking, an effort taking place in cities all across the country. We'll be bringing together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs to build open source software in a short weekend of fun and fulfillment.

Maybe you need to beat your competitors to be first to market. Maybe you need to keep promises you've made to investors and customers (or more likely, promises your boss has made). Maybe you need to keep your product moving forward while you find the right hire. In each case, contracting an outside development team can be an effective strategy if you manage geographic distance, technical expertise, and budget smartly.

Join us for our first Quick Cast webinar March 19 if you'd like to hear lessons learned from those who have been there.

Rachel asked me to share a post I wrote on my personal blog yesterday, so here's a taste:

Finding a technical co-founder is hard. Non-technical entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs ask me how to find one on a pretty regular basis. I usually name a few events in Boulder where developers show up and wish them luck. Recently, however, I decided to add a parting thought: having a hard time finding a technical co-founder may be a sign that you and your idea aren't compelling enough.

Read the post in its entirety.

Rocky Mountain Ruby is less than a week away and the team at Quick Left is getting ready. In case you haven't heard, we're running an Intro to Backbone.js workshop on Saturday 9/22. We had so much fun doing this workshop in San Francisco last week that we're gettin' crazy - we're giving away a ticket to one lucky person and setting up a discount for everybody else!

After popping his head into QLHQ to say goodbye this morning, Sam headed off to Boston for BackboneConf 2012. We're thrilled to have him sharing our experience developing with the library and exchanging notes with other Backbone.js contributors.

I managed to survive NYC. Earlier this week I sat on a panel at Likeable U, a social media conference that took place during Internet Week in New York City. I had a chance to tell the Quick Left story, meet a bunch of cool people, and eat, eat, eat.

_Photo by Clare Tischer, who assembled the #bestpanelever_

The Quick Left team is all over the map these days. Literally. Rachel and Ingrid are in Nebraska for Big Omaha, and by the time they get back on Monday, I'll be in New York City during Internet Week to sit on a panel at Likeable U with our friends from TechStars - both old and new.

I'll be joining Kelly Rice, Kinvey, Lauren Appelwick, Shelby.tv, Dan Herman, ChatID, and our moderator Clare Tischer, TechStars. Clare plans to make our event the best of the conference. I'll be doing my best to keep up with the rest of the panel.

I'm in NYC Monday the 14th and for the conference Tuesday the 15th - drop me a line if you'd like to grab a cup of coffee.

Most importantly, I'm looking for recommendations for eateries in the Chelsea-ish area - the cheaper, dirtier, and sketchier, the better. Seriously - this is the most important thing aside from the conference itself - recommendations in the comments would be hugely appreciated.

Quick Left's love affair with the Backbone.js library has culminated in our very first training event, Intro to Backbone.js. We've implemented Backbone in a variety of different web applications both internally and for our customers, so it was only natural to share some of that experience in the form of a hands-on workshop.

Not too long ago we came up with an idea to shake things up with our hackfests: The One Night Stand. We held the infamous event last Wednesday by matching people that needed help on a project with people willing to share their skills for a couple of hours. It was a great time all around and there was even some actual code written!

Not bad, especially when you consider that nobody had to suffer the humiliation of a walk of shame.

Thanks to our sponsors at Silicon Valley Bank, we were able to kick off our quarterly Lunch and Learn series with Minimum Viable Product and Beyond on Wednesday.