Conference sessions occur throughout the conference schedule and cover a wide variety of topics. This year, tracks will include rapid application development, cross platform coding, and marketing for the small software vendor. With the advent of the Internet and networked technologies, numerous net technologies have been available for first hand evaluation. These have included Active-X, Java, PGP and streaming media technologies. Since the conference's inception at U of M, fostering developing software engineers has been a key activity at MacHack.
Students are able to attend the conference for a greatly reduced rate to encourage their attendance.
There are sessions and activities focused on student attendees so that they can develop both a network of industry contacts as well as their engineering prowess. Additionally, veteran engineers routinely spend time with students in informal contact aiding with coding and design at the conference. The MacHack's lack of orthodoxy extends well beyond its location. The conference begins at midnight on Wednesday with the keynote speaker that extends into the wee hours of Thursday. The entire conference has events scheduled around the clock until the banquet closes out the conference on Saturday night.