Even if it is your own work, if you are attacking a popular problem, and you are an average programmer, you are very likely going to hit upon the same sort of solution as others have already discovered.
For example, I'd be willing to bet that there will be a relatively large number of people that would present some sort of implementation of remote procedure calls - it's something that lets you do cool stuff, whilst still being hard core hacker stuff - dynamic code, low-level syntax analysis, memory management, blah blah blah.
A while back I did an RPC implementation to allow transparent interfacing between a custom VM I had written, and native C code. Basically you write the entire app in one big C code blob, but then during compilation you specify that certain modules are going to live in the VM. I had created some tools used during compilation to handle the creation of proxy objects on both sides of the VM interface, that could talk to each other. I was really impressed with myself. Then I discovered that 90% of the solution was simply an implementation of RPC, and that my code was a slightly messier, slightly buggier version of code that had been written many many times before.
I think I'd get bored pretty quickly seeing multiple presentations of slightly messy, slightly buggy implementations of already solved problems. You see, unless you are a genius, or a complete beginner, you will probably end up with a solution that resembles, a lot, solutions already produced by other competent programmers.
Even so, you grow your talents and experience in the very doing of the act. I always thought Hacking was for your personal gratification rather than the accolades of others.
Sure. But I'm guessing that the organisers of this thing have proposed the obligatory first night presentation in an attempt to filter out know-nothing blowhards. You know, the guy that always criticizes everything, using all the latest buzz-words, without ever really coming to grasp with why you chose to implement something without using Struts, or Rails, or Ajax, or whatever tomorrow's buzz-word turns out to be.
But I agree with you - I don't think I would be sufficiently interested in belonging to a group of hackers to put myself in the situation of risking public criticism, or having to kowtow to the sensibilities of others that may have a very different philosophy of life to me. I reserve that risk for things that I actually consider worth it, such as making lots of money :-)
For example, I'd be willing to bet that there will be a relatively large number of people that would present some sort of implementation of remote procedure calls - it's something that lets you do cool stuff, whilst still being hard core hacker stuff - dynamic code, low-level syntax analysis, memory management, blah blah blah.
A while back I did an RPC implementation to allow transparent interfacing between a custom VM I had written, and native C code. Basically you write the entire app in one big C code blob, but then during compilation you specify that certain modules are going to live in the VM. I had created some tools used during compilation to handle the creation of proxy objects on both sides of the VM interface, that could talk to each other. I was really impressed with myself. Then I discovered that 90% of the solution was simply an implementation of RPC, and that my code was a slightly messier, slightly buggier version of code that had been written many many times before.
I think I'd get bored pretty quickly seeing multiple presentations of slightly messy, slightly buggy implementations of already solved problems. You see, unless you are a genius, or a complete beginner, you will probably end up with a solution that resembles, a lot, solutions already produced by other competent programmers.