Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
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Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
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Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#2Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#3As a backend developer. This is correct.
I’ve seen teams waste months building a perfect system that doesn’t do what’s needed.
Building a clickable demo that fakes is literally 1000 times better. When the feedback comes in you can change it almost in real time.
Once everyone is happy with how the UX and all that work then someone can build the actual requirements.
Which will look nothing like the original idea.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#4This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#5This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.
Yes, it's sad to see how those have taken over the term so much
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#6If anyone's looking to participate in a large (on the order of 100 participants or more) hackathon in the near future, this advice is 100% on the money. No matter how demonstrably useful your product is, something with better UX will win 9 times out of 10, even if the idea behind the good UX is inherently flawed and the application isn't even functional beyond the wireframe level (no one will fuzz test it).
I came away from this thinking hackathons were a complete and total waste of time, but at the same time while I've not once won a prize at a hackathon despite participating in several, I have my current job because of connections I gained during one.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#7Point taken, but jeez, Hackathons are supposed to be participatory/inclusive events. Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks. Full disclosure I am running a hackathon at my company this very week and am nervous about participation and this post made me anxious lol.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#8*For one very narrow definition of Hackathon
Seems like the author needs to attend Hackathons where the sole purpose isn't to sell a SaaS prototype to investors and clients. I have been to enough of them where no one cares how fancy the CSS styling on the page looks. Or even that there's a GUI at all. One time the winner wrote a CLI script. I routinely demo API calls using Postman.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#9Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.
I won a hackathon once with PowerPoint mock-ups (read: a slide deck). The term “hackathon” means nothing anymore. They’re just pitch competitions anymore.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#10Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.
My organization's most recent hack day was won by the UX team signing up for a free demo of a chat bot service and demoing it - not a single line of code. We haven't had one since, nor do we use chat bots anywhere in our org a few years later.