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My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

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Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#11

Post by lnsru »

redis_mlc wrote: post #7

It's important to distinguish between the different hackathons. There's corporate, VC, meetup, etc. I would read the fine print very carefully before signing on for a corporate or VC-sponsored hackathon.

This! I participated at couple hackathons and solved the challenges of the sponsors. Basically free idea generation for corporations. Low networking value, only innovation managers and HR for graduate recruitment. Afterwards I got invitations to hackathons where I must even pay for participation. Thank you, but no!

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#13

Post by michaelscott2 »

mamouri wrote: post #10

I can relate. A few years ago, I wrote this piece: Why hackathons are for wankers! Or how to hack a hackathon? [1] [1] https://medium.com/@mispronounced/why-hackathons-are-for-wan...

> I wrote this piece: Why hackathons are for wankers!

Do you know the meaning of a wanker?

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#14

Post by marcus_holmes »

My love/hate thing with hackathons is how it gives non-coders the idea that you can put together a product in a weekend.

There's a vast difference between hackathon code designed to maybe last for an hour during a demo (with no security or privacy concerns) and production code that can actually support a business model. And it's not just "so... that'll take twice as long to make?". Turning a weekend hackathon demo into an actual production code base can take weeks or months.

But explaining that to a non-coder is really difficult. Hackathons set expectations so high.

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#15

Post by collyw »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #14

My love/hate thing with hackathons is how it gives non-coders the idea that you can put together a product in a weekend. There's a vast difference between hackathon code designed to maybe last for an hour during a demo (with no security or privacy concerns) and production code that can actually support a business model. And it's not just "so... that'll take twice as long to make?". Turning a weekend hackathon demo in…

I got a similar feeling from the last technical test I did.

"It should take two or three hours". The failed me on a long list of nitpicks, including not setting up mocks for testing, not running pylint (I would need to install it on my personal machine) not providing a setup.py (which was never asked for) and numerous other trivial things some of which directly contradicted what the spec actually asked for.

If I had actually done all the things they complained about it would have been closer to two days worth of work. Wankers.

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#16

Post by detaro »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8
wrnr wrote: post #5

A hackaton can be a fun excuse to experiment with random, but when I learned about the pan european hackaton against the corona virus organised by the EU commission I didn't know if I should to laugh or cry. Its like children playing doctor: https://euvsvirus.org/

Institutionalized Engineer's syndrome, to be fair however doctors have their own version of the syndrome so it's fair. on edit: evidently I really like to be fair.

It's also not like there are no problems outside medicine caused by the current situation. A hackathon won't solve those either, but can provide exactly the mentioned space to experiment and communicate can be the starting point for larger projects. I think the big recent ones didn't do a particularly good job at pointing people in the right direction though, so there's been a lot of projects that indeed seem questionable.

I.e. the platform that sprung up that crowdsources which stores etc closed and which didn't doesn't heal people, but has been quite helpful to find something I needed urgently. The grassroots effort that filled gaps in the PPE supply by scaling from a few hackerspaces doing 3D printed faceshield holders to organizing companies and community spaces to get parts injection-molded, material distributed, and shields assembled in the thousands is exactly about finding and connecting people with the right skills and resources. etc...

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#17

Post by detaro »

In recent years most things calling themselves "Hackathon" sadly seem to emphasize the competition aspect. You quickly find teams, it's important to be really productive in the short time, theres big prizes for the winners, and the sponsor wants something in exchange. I tend to prefer ones that are more relaxed and cooperative. Often calling themselves "hackdays" instead?

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#18

Post by werber »

I’ve done my fair share of hackathons, and to me it was a fun social thing. Like a rave for nerds, but, like spending the weekend in a sweaty factory staying up all night, you’re not going to make great choices and they take it out of you. But, if you’re young it’s really damn fun.

Re: My Love and Hate Relationship with Hackathons

#19

Post by xllaa »

Original idea:

"OpenBSD's apparent first use of the term referred to a cryptographic development event held in Calgary on June 4, 1999."

In the current corporate "open" source world the term has been stolen and is little more than a marketing buzzword.

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