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…
Let's add a new button! How many story points is the button? (Insert 2-hour discussion about what a story point is) Okay, "Uncle Bob says" we need at least seven layers of code around it. Someone insists on doing it "TDD", even though the UI framework is not testable. Oops, the Agile Consultant broke Jira, it will be back up in two days. The PR gets stuck for days because of trailing whitespace violations. The button doesn't actually work, but the outsourced developer complains loudly until someone gives in and merges it. Review time!
The code that results from this madness is not better than Hackathon code, just bad in a different way. If anything, my last Hackathon has made me aware of how much I want to work for an effective company at some point in my life, so I guess it was worthwhile.