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Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

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Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#21

Post by locahost »

jeffbr13 wrote: post #9

What makes a good hackathon? As a frequent attendee, these patterns have stuck out as successful to me: 1. Set over the course of a weekend. Allows greater breadth of attendees. Not 24 hours (which is somewhat manic) but rather a more leisurely schedule of Friday: beers/pitching/team-forming; Saturday: hacking; Sunday: polish, pitching-practice, pitches, award ceremony. 2. Strong focus/process/timetable. Ensure every…

I avoid signing up for multi-day hackathons. Almost none of the venues guarantee quiet, secure places for naps. It'll be great if attendees can sleep at home without penalizing their teams.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#22

Post by avidas »

From my experience of going to 20+ hackathons, few things come to mind

1. Have a well defined target audience and reach out early. People make weekend plans.

2. Be very clear about judging criteria.

3. Heavy presence of organizers throughout the event. It's not always easy for newbies at hackathon's, and organizers/mentors being around during the whole thing is great motivation.

4. A good venue where people can find quiet space/at the same time space to socialize.

5. Find a good balance between cheerleading during the hackathon and people working. Sponsor events are important, but continuous interruptions do not help flow work.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#25

Post by zem »

hackathons seem to divide into two main types - one where people get together to build stuff and advance the state of a (usually popular) open source project via a concentrated sprint, and the other where people or teams compete for prizes.

personally, the latter strikes me as betwixt and between - if i wanted the competition, i'd rather enter a pure programming contest with explicitly artificial problems and well-defined judging criteria, and if i wanted to build something i'd rather be doing it cooperatively than competitively.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#26

Post by flipside »

I do a lot of hackathons. My record is 4/26 for winning 1st, 16/26 for winning 1 or more prizes, mentored 3 times and judged once.

Do it on a weekend, have interesting sponsors with prizes, and make the judging/presentation criteria very clear from the start. Also attendance can be hard to estimate, not everyone will show up and not everyone will come back, plan accordingly.

Also, three pieces of advice I always give at hackathons:

  1. work backwards from the presentation
  2. only build what you show
  3. only show the interesting parts
Happy to mentor/judge, mat@tinj.com.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#27

Post by raymondgh »

I've been to around a dozen in the past year, here's my take:

Stable Wi-Fi. Don't charge for admission. Adhere to a strict fresh code rule. Limit teams to 4 or 5. Stick to your judging criteria (fun, business, innovation -- whatever it is, be consistent from start to finish) and find non-sponsor judges to choose the overall winners of an interestingly themed challenge. Provide enough water and food for everyone. If you're hosting it in San Francisco, there are plenty of hungry people who will eat the leftovers. Have 2 rounds of presentations if there are more than 30 submissions. Have someone go around and tell hackers to simplify their ideas and explain the meaning of a weekend MVP.

Follow these and you should have an acceptably successful hackathon. If you want to be memorable though, try something new!

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#28

Post by hyoogle »

raymondgh wrote: post #27

I've been to around a dozen in the past year, here's my take: Stable Wi-Fi. Don't charge for admission. Adhere to a strict fresh code rule. Limit teams to 4 or 5. Stick to your judging criteria (fun, business, innovation -- whatever it is, be consistent from start to finish) and find non-sponsor judges to choose the overall winners of an interestingly themed challenge. Provide enough water and food for everyone. If y…

Hey! I'd love to learn more about your favorites of the ones you've been to- would you mind sharing which ones they were?

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#29

Post by alex_g »

Sandwiches from a local deli make awesome lunch. One hackathon I went to had these ginormous bean bag chairs, so that was cool. Don't make people attend certain sessions/presentations. You can offer them for those interested, but don't require attendance. Having a very open prompt/challenge is appreciated. If you want to make it more specific, that's fine, but keep it open ended within that specific theme. i.e. "do something creative related to xyz and abc", not "design a solution that will do xyz and also does abc and of course meets the criteria of jfk".

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good hackathon?

#30

Post by asafira »

bahador wrote: post #2

I've noticed two things that have ruined hackathons for me: - People that say they have skill in XYZ, when in fact they have little to no experience in XYZ. It would be nice if I could have some reasonable confidence in a stranger's ability to be experienced in a skill they claim to have. - "Entrepreneurs" interested in getting free dev labor for their unicorn app idea. I sign up for a hackathon to have some fun and…

These are two great points. It's important to note that Hackathons should be open to people with a wide range of skills, but there's definitely a ceratinly baseline when it comes to saying "I know XYZ".

Honest and hard working > skills but not actually.

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