Hacker Paradise, a unique tropical school for entrepreneurial hackers located in the pristine beach town of Playa Carrillo in Guanacaste, recently completed its programming retreat in Costa Rica. Readers of The Costa Rica Star will remember when we first wrote about this interesting academy:

At a boutique hotel in the picturesque beach town of Playa Carrillo,province of Guanacaste, a group of programmers are scratching their heads trying to figure out why none of the major surf report providers have Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), those programmatic gateways that provide access to data for third-party Web applications. The idea is to build a chat bot that can provide Web users with surf forecasts, but it looks like the forecast providers are not keen on giving up their precious oceanographic data.

In a blog post published a couple of weeks after retreat participants left Costa Rica, organizer Casey Rosengren explained about the challenges involved in Hacker Paradise, which include ants invading hardware and accessories:

As our host for the retreat, we partnered with a small, boutique hotel set in the jungle of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Being set in the jungle, the weather was often hot and humid, and there were lots of ants and other little critters crawling around. Some people were unprepared for this […]

While the jungle offered a serene and remote location, it also meant that we more isolated than people expected – the nearest town was ~20 minutes away, and even that was quite small.

A benefit of this was that the community formed quickly and became quite close. This may have been because the only people you really interacted with on a regular basis were the other participants.

We knew that having consistently good Internet connection would be important for the retreat, and to prepare, we brought in four separate lines – two cable lines at 3 Mbps and two DSL lines at 6 Mbps. Within the first week, however, it became clear that while the bandwidth might be sufficient, the routing equipment at the hotel could not handle the necessary number of simultaneous connections.

Our workspace for the retreat was also the hotel restaurant. On the one hand, this was convenient – you could order lunch while working and then dive back into your projects after your meal. However, it also blurred the lines between work and play, which may have contributed to feelings of overwork and burnout at times.

We had several issues arise in deals that were made with a local masseuse and a local surf instructor. Shortly after our participants committed to a deal, the locals tried to charge them more money. This could have been due to a miscommunication, but from the circumstances, it seems more likely that they needed money and thought they could get more out of us.

As an institution, Hacker Paradise is just getting started, but the next session will not take place in Costa Rica. The retreat is moving to Southeast Asia, similar to the move conducted by Intel when it closed its large chip manufacturing plant in Costa Rica and moved to Vietnam. It is important to note that Costa Rica is currently home to GoCode, a programming bootcamp that is located just a few beaches over from Playa Carrillo in Guanacaste.