Running the Code Marathon

ENAR

It was not until the can-can came on that Firas finally lost it. The tall, bearded man rushed to the sound system, cranked it up to full volume, raised his hands and wiggled his body – somewhere between a dabke and the Harlem Shake, but definitely nothing like the can-can. The moves failed to illicit much of a response; the half dozen men around him briefly looked up before returning to their computer screens. But that was 2:00 am on Sunday morning — hour 34 — and a lot had already happened by then.   Developing developers Hackathons — where developers are given a finite amount of time to design and build a particular product — are relatively common in the West. But this is not Silicon Valley or London, but Beirut. While Lebanon’s Internet is among the slowest in the world, the last two years have seen rapid improvements,