Yeah I went to a Javascript meetup and it was amazing. Unlike the ruby meetups that were mostly just bootcamp people, it was all industry professionals and people there because they love JS, and it worked out great. Also you're right I went to a open university Hackathon and just spent hours trying to get my team to build anything. I was building out a Node/socket.io api to work with both a rails Web app and an Android and these students didn't even know how to parse a json string in Java, and I kept on telling them that there is just a simple function for that. Anyways long story short after 12 hours they had noting working, and I was unable to finish the Android app in time.

the weird thing is, they are all getting offers for entry level positions and these companies wont even consider me as a possibility.