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Hackathon Be Gone

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Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#101

Post by Chris2048 »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #77
turkishrevenge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just exploit the identity-political zeitgeist that's overtaken universities lately: claim yourself genderqueer, non-binary presenting as male. With the right incantation, the organizers will fold like a house of cards, lest they suffer the blowback to excluding a "righteous" participant.

It actually turns out that cargo culting the language of social justice works about as well as the sovereign citizen idiots that cargo cult legal jargon -- both of these phenomena exist in a broad, clear social context and it's laughably obvious when someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, like you, attempts an "incantation" with the idea that it's magic words because they don't or can't understand what'…

> it's laughably obvious when someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, like you

You can tell from a single comment?

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#102

Post by lmm »

octref wrote: post #36

The worst thing I feel about hackathon is that it instills a bad culture of software development into young programmers. People spend a weekend writing crappy code and wiring APIs together, expecting to get money and fame. In the real world, we don't need more crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks. We need more solid, performant, well-designed apps. Sadly, none of these points are prior…

I think this kind of "worse is better" is actually a very valuable thing to learn. These "crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks" provide a lot of value to people, which is ultimately a lot more important than engineering pride.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#103

Post by robowork »

mdxn wrote: post #53

The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate…

It's about time we synthetically attempted to skew the gender ratios in an entire industry! Fucktards.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#104

Post by collyw »

lmm wrote: post #102
octref wrote: post #36

The worst thing I feel about hackathon is that it instills a bad culture of software development into young programmers. People spend a weekend writing crappy code and wiring APIs together, expecting to get money and fame. In the real world, we don't need more crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks. We need more solid, performant, well-designed apps. Sadly, none of these points are prior…

I think this kind of "worse is better" is actually a very valuable thing to learn. These "crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks" provide a lot of value to people, which is ultimately a lot more important than engineering pride.

In what way is it more important? I thought having stable maintaniable applications is pretty useful thing to try to achieve.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#105

Post by truebosko »

caseysoftware wrote: post #21

In Austin, we started running an event called "Finish Up Weekend" or FU Weekend - http://fuweekend.com/ ;) We have some simple rules: * you can't start anything new; * you have to celebrate something being done - usually with a round of applause; * there are no prizes - only the satisfaction of being done. While there is plenty of coding, we've had designers finish their portfolios, screenwriters finish pilots, an ar…

Great idea. I would love to get this going in Toronto.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#106

Post by [deleted] »

caseysoftware wrote: post #21

In Austin, we started running an event called "Finish Up Weekend" or FU Weekend - http://fuweekend.com/ ;) We have some simple rules: * you can't start anything new; * you have to celebrate something being done - usually with a round of applause; * there are no prizes - only the satisfaction of being done. While there is plenty of coding, we've had designers finish their portfolios, screenwriters finish pilots, an ar…

[deleted]

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#107

Post by werber »

turkishrevenge wrote: post #69
mdxn wrote: post #53

The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate…

Just exploit the identity-political zeitgeist that's overtaken universities lately: claim yourself genderqueer, non-binary presenting as male. With the right incantation, the organizers will fold like a house of cards, lest they suffer the blowback to excluding a "righteous" participant.

This is insanely problematic. Exploiting marginalized identities is not only rude, but the blow back of pulling a Soul Man is not good for the person pulling the cons future prospects

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#108

Post by S4M »

collyw wrote: post #104
lmm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this kind of "worse is better" is actually a very valuable thing to learn. These "crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks" provide a lot of value to people, which is ultimately a lot more important than engineering pride.

In what way is it more important? I thought having stable maintaniable applications is pretty useful thing to try to achieve.

Seems both are complimentary. Hackathons are for prototyping, building stable maintainable applications is for the long term.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#109

Post by lmm »

collyw wrote: post #104
lmm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this kind of "worse is better" is actually a very valuable thing to learn. These "crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks" provide a lot of value to people, which is ultimately a lot more important than engineering pride.

In what way is it more important? I thought having stable maintaniable applications is pretty useful thing to try to achieve.

My empirical experience is that programmers err too much on the side of doing things right. Most code has a relatively short lifetime; a lot of code simply won't be maintained much, because the first version is used to test a business assumption that often turns out to be false. Stability and maintainability are useful, but rarely as useful as being fast to market.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#110

Post by Chris2048 »

alexashka wrote: post #26
nxzero wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is to get something done, force you to make choice, have a deadline, etc. -- not something else, like production ready code.

The older you get - the less patience you have for tight deadlines and 'forcing yourself to make a choice'. That's just having more energy than you know what to do with. The tragedy is young people have lots of energy and are scatterbrained and old people are sometimes wise but too tired. The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.…

> The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.

This can easily be abused to keep talented young people 'in their place' which elders get all the power.

Have anyone write the proposal, and any critique it - just ensure both roles are considered equally valuable.

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