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Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#71

Post by DTrejo »

theyCallMeSwift wrote: post #53
iqster wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jorge ... thanks for your note. And I want to thank Foursquare for organizing the event. You guys didn't charge to let people in (unlike some other events), provided free food the entire day and were very helpful in answering questions. My main goal was to learn to use your API and I did. I appreciate this a lot! My frustration wasn't directed solely at the Foursquare hackathon. Like I said ... I've seen this happen…

I completely feel you pain on this one. I attended the New England College Hackathon last weekend and was utterly disappointed. During the 12 hours we were there, they managed to only feed us once and we were bombarded by windows surveys and evangelists looking for free / cheap labor. To make matters worse, the judges only picked winners from the local area (and made poor choices IMHO). The second place winner did NO…

Hey man, thanks for the feedback. We did a bad job, next time I hope we'll do better. Some of the things we'll focus on:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241031

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#72

Post by zizee »

dekz wrote: post #69
pamelafox wrote: post #56

I've been to many hackathons both in the SF Bay area and in the Sydney area, and I find the Sydney ones to involve much more hacking. I think many people in the tech scene in the SF bay area are there because they want to get in on that scene, because it's the hot/$$ thing todo, but they don't actually have tech skills - so when they come to tech events, they either find a way to not hack, or they find someone to hol…

Maybe moving to Sydney is something I should look into, theres the occasional meetup (ruby, node communities (in a library :P)) but that's all there seems to be. Brisbane is rather dull in many ways.

What's the best way to get in contact with all the Brisbane based hackers so we can get the scene off the ground?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#74

Post by epnk »

We attended the Foursquare hackathon yesterday as participants and ended up winning with our thedealio.at private messaging app.

To be honest, the only thing we had completed prior to arriving at 1:00p was that we knew the idea. We had no name, no code written, had not heard about the new API features released, nothing. So at least it's one datapoint that the winners aren't all pre-developed, polished products.

For me, the biggest benefit of hackathons are that you are absolutely forced to use all sorts of skills, not all developer-focused. We had to discover a problem that was worth solving for a lot of people (P/M fit, I suppose). We had to battle with stupid issues like buying an .at domain name and having my credit card get locked up due to an overseas suspicious purchase, then having to wait for DNS to propagate so we could get an SSL certificate issued as required by a new feature of the Foursquare API. Also how the look and feel should be, the UX--simplicity, fun, and engaging. We spent the first three hours writing no code, just getting our game plan in place.

Then of course in the actual development we broke all kinds of rules like code duplication, no testing, editing code directly on the production server, etc. We focused squarely on speed, knowing that time would be our biggest threat.

Which brings me to my main point. Building any software product is all about compromises, and knowing when to make them. It does go against the spirit of a hackathon to bring a polished product to demo, while just networking all day. We didn't do that and did okay. But only by using every means available (including pretty much skipping dinner).

I hope that the possibility of polished products doesn't hurt the hackathon spirit, and this post is mostly to offer encouragment that single-day hacks can still hold their own. There were some really great hacks there, and the ones I know that were built just yesterday were among my favorites (4squareand7years being my particular fave).

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#75

Post by lurker19 »

catch23 wrote: post #31
jorgeortiz85 wrote: post #19

Hey isqster, I'm Jorge and I work as a software engineer at Foursquare. I'm sorry to hear that you're frustrated at our hackathon. Certainly some people are chatting and socializing, but that's only natural when you put a lot of people in the same room. From what I can tell though, the vast majority of people are actually building something today. Some people have brought projects that they started before today, but…

One easy way is to give away prizes to the top 3 apps built at the hackathon. The reason why people actually coded at the iOS hackathon were the prizes (I attended). Obviously submissions built prior to the hackathon would be disqualified so this prevents people from building it, then attending. There's still lots of socialization, but I believe hackathons should be centered around code, otherwise you might as well j…

An iPad is not a significant prize. A professional developer earns an ipad every day or two at their day job, and that is guaranteed even for the fourth best work product of the day.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#76

Post by dfield »

theyCallMeSwift wrote: post #53
iqster wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jorge ... thanks for your note. And I want to thank Foursquare for organizing the event. You guys didn't charge to let people in (unlike some other events), provided free food the entire day and were very helpful in answering questions. My main goal was to learn to use your API and I did. I appreciate this a lot! My frustration wasn't directed solely at the Foursquare hackathon. Like I said ... I've seen this happen…

I completely feel you pain on this one. I attended the New England College Hackathon last weekend and was utterly disappointed. During the 12 hours we were there, they managed to only feed us once and we were bombarded by windows surveys and evangelists looking for free / cheap labor. To make matters worse, the judges only picked winners from the local area (and made poor choices IMHO). The second place winner did NO…

I'm extremely sorry to hear you were disappointed. Like dtrejo said, there are a LOT of things we hope to change for next time. Please don't hesitate to shoot me an email if you have any other feedback.

Also, I can't resist pointing out that all but ten lines of code for the first place hack were created during the Hackathon: https://github.com/dfield/ConcertMasterHero. That said, I did not accept the first place prize because I was an organizer.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#77

Post by dekz »

zizee wrote: post #72
dekz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe moving to Sydney is something I should look into, theres the occasional meetup (ruby, node communities (in a library :P)) but that's all there seems to be. Brisbane is rather dull in many ways.

What's the best way to get in contact with all the Brisbane based hackers so we can get the scene off the ground?

There are a few groups on meetup.com (rails, js, and some some other smaller ones). That is all I seem to know of.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#78

Post by catch23 »

lurker19 wrote: post #75
catch23 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One easy way is to give away prizes to the top 3 apps built at the hackathon. The reason why people actually coded at the iOS hackathon were the prizes (I attended). Obviously submissions built prior to the hackathon would be disqualified so this prevents people from building it, then attending. There's still lots of socialization, but I believe hackathons should be centered around code, otherwise you might as well j…

An iPad is not a significant prize. A professional developer earns an ipad every day or two at their day job, and that is guaranteed even for the fourth best work product of the day.

Significant compared to most hackathon prizes is what I meant. Most hack day prizes are a pat on the back or useless company schwag. I don't believe hackers attend hack days for the purpose of actually making enough money to fund their living styles.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#79

Post by heliodor »

I participated yesterday. It's my second hackathon. I get your frustration with the typical hackathon.

My approach is to focus on finding the right people and the right concept at the beginning of the event and to get to know them better while working with them. The goal is to walk away with some new relationships. I spend only a small amount of time talking with the rest of the crowd.

At an event like the foursquare hackathon, I'm not really concerned what happens with the presentations. At other events, like TechCrunch Disrupt or Startup Weekend, I would.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon?

#80

Post by Dylanlacey »

zizee wrote: post #72
dekz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe moving to Sydney is something I should look into, theres the occasional meetup (ruby, node communities (in a library :P)) but that's all there seems to be. Brisbane is rather dull in many ways.

What's the best way to get in contact with all the Brisbane based hackers so we can get the scene off the ground?

Funny you should ask this today, I just sent out a notification for YBITS, the Young Brisbane IT Social.

The idea is to get a group of like-minded young (of mind) IT professionals together in a 'networking' format that doesn't feel douchy.

It's part of my cunning master-plan to give Brisbane a bit more of a startup scene, but most of the attendees are still un-aware:P

I think it'd be a great venue to kick something like that off, do you want to work together on something? YBITS is here: https://groups.google.com/group/YBITS/browse_thread/thread/4... (That's the link to our march meeting) and you can contact me via my details here.

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