Happy Node Knockout 2012 kick off! It’s 9:30pm here at the Node Knockout headquarters in San Francisco, but teams from all over the world started hacking four hours ago at 12am UTC / 4pm PST. Competitors started trickling into Joyent’s office to stake out their hacking spots around 3pm, taking a break around 6pm to eat, drink and get the official welcome from the Node Knockout organizers, Visnu Pitiyanuvath @visnup and Gerad Suyderhoud @gerad and Isaac Schlueter @izs, “step-father” of Node.js.

Isaac shared some crucial bits of information about using Node, promised that he wasn’t screwing with us and even gave a tip about how to code with fonts.

Follow @node_knockout for progress on this 48 hour expedition.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s happened so far:

We set up Security (Ryan doing security - right):

NKO Organizers welcomed everybody while avatarschatted in real-time on Nodeknockout.com (right):

Isaac promised everyone that we can trust him:

"I'm not making stuff up just to screw with you guys, this is really in the language." --@izs @joyent @node_knockout twitter.com/jmclulow/statu…

— Joshua M. Clulow (@jmclulow) November 10, 2012

Everyone started working, or at least @eduarbo andTeam TangoSource did (right):

Some people started drinking beer (right):NKO Joyent HQ event organizer @mle_tanaka, with @LindsayofSF,and @wickedrb.

Nobody has cracked and started playing ping-pong yet (right):

Here are some helpful links and tips:

• irc is the best place to get help with deployment and nodejitsu: #nodejitsu on irc.freenode.net. You can also email support@nodejitsu.com.
• If you haven’t used nodejitsu before check this blog post: Getting started with Nodejitsu.
• The expert judges ask that you submit a short screencast to highlight what you think is best about your app. This can happen after the coding period ends. @visnup
• Here’s the link to download Century Schoolbook Mono. Now anyone can experience the joys of coding in serif! “There’s a reason it’s in books, easy to read. Your eyes will thank you” @izs.
• Official crowdsourced soundtrack to NKO3 turntable.fm/nko3.

Happy Hacking!