Having personally worked on responsive redesigns for ew.com, techcrunch.com, and timeinc.com, I know as well as anyone that designing a full scale responsive site can be hard. Really hard.
That said, the hard parts are not the technology or the implementation. Rather, the hard parts are organizational dysfunction, legacy CMS software, integration with non-responsive 3rd party services like ad networks, and so on.
The complete lack of those sorts of challenges in something like a hackathon means that devs are free to design in a way that maybe they can't do at work or for clients. My shock was that given such freedom, they choose to basically ignore mobile.
Having personally worked on responsive redesigns for ew.com, techcrunch.com, and timeinc.com, I know as well as anyone that designing a full scale responsive site can be hard. Really hard.
That said, the hard parts are not the technology or the implementation. Rather, the hard parts are organizational dysfunction, legacy CMS software, integration with non-responsive 3rd party services like ad networks, and so on.
The complete lack of those sorts of challenges in something like a hackathon means that devs are free to design in a way that maybe they can't do at work or for clients. My shock was that given such freedom, they choose to basically ignore mobile.