The words of the PDRS' motto apply perfectly to Iron Coder Live.
The one MacHack I went to was a ton of fun, in part because of the Hack contest. Even though my personal attempt at a hack was fairly lame. Basically, I thought of an idea (since the small group of people I had happened to be chatting with was without one at that time) and then didn't contribute much else (I was attempting to do my own from scratch unix-y implementation while the group did one based on some classic Mac OS code they had from other projects). Then, when we went to present, we had the unfortunate chance to be right behind someone else who had a similar hack (with a better presentation even though he had just taken an existing tool and built it on Mac OS X while we had built something new).
In any event, I need to quickly think of an idea and hack something together (or just decide to have fun at the conference without presenting a hack - which is, I think, a perfectly acceptable option).
The API+theme is delicious, though. If I get any kind of cool idea I'll have to at least try to put something together.
