Clothing swag is a huge part of hacker culture.
At every hackathon, at every tech convention, at every tech gathering/launch party/soiree — you’ll find yourself swimming amidst a sea of hacker t-shirts and hoodies that are emblazoned with the names of companies and events gone by.
Part of it is marketing savvy. A great, fun, and comfortable T-shirt is an eminently wearable T-shirt, and a hacker walking around with your company’s logo is a great way to get your name into the community. But clothing swag is also a sharp community building tool: on the one hand, wearing a T-shirt from a previous hackathon is a wonderful way of keeping connected to that community while signaling a possible commonality with other strangers in the world. On the other hand, wearing a Quixey shirt indicates either support or delight with the company’s product, service, and/or mission, which in turn signals your place in the community of those supporters. (Or maybe it’s just an indication that it’s a really great T-shirt. But still.)
But it’s not all marketing and community building. Sometime, a hacker at a hackathon just wants to bust out something fun and funny. Here are four choice T-shirts at MHacks this past weekend:
Impatient Banana
“It was a terrible 5 am inside joke that came out from the last hackathon we went to.”
Kaitlin (left), Joe (center), Andrew (right), from various schools.
World Bacon Wrestling Champion
Tom from Purdue University.
Teach Me How to Bucky
“It’s a saying in Madison, Wisconsin.”
Dakota from the University of Madison-Wisconsin.
Run GCC
“Install Linux”
Tim from Troy High School