Your doing it wrong. Get a night's rest and get back to it in the morning and you'll code better than everyone else who stayed up all night.
This is what I do. Get some rest, and come back.
Hackathon No More
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Hackathon No More
#22If you use that much Red Bull, you got 2 issues (at least): the sugar gives a rush, but the bloodsugar level will plunge. And each time you continue it plunges even harder and faster. Second, Red Bull or any caffinated beverage will attack your adrenal gland badly. Realy hard. Your adrenal gland is responsible for your adrenaline (duh) and gets triggered by the caffeine. So, it's not the caffeine that gives you a boo…
I use caffeine actually primarily to control my ADD. The effect is harder to put my finger on, longer lasting, and more necessary for my work. If I am without caffeine for a couple fo days, my productivity drops modestly but that's ok. If I continue for a few weeks however at some point I may have trouble doing anything. I might spend all my time on HN at that point.
I do agree about energy drinks though. Tea works for me. I drink coffee in a pinch. Mix those with sugar and I can say goodbye to doing anything worthwhile though....
Re: Hackathon No More
#23Whenever we (http://brighterplanet.com) sponsor hackathons we always do a "Healthy Hacker" component, with yoga, healthy food, etc. e.g.:
http://numbers.brighterplanet.com/2011/04/12/healthy-hacker-... http://numbers.brighterplanet.com/2012/01/27/cleanweb-hackat...
Re: Hackathon No More
#24there could be a parallel food-o-thon where people do molecular gastronomy recipes in teams and then serve it to hackers. And also bio-feedback would be good.
Re: Hackathon No More
#25This is how we do things at ZocDoc actually (http://engineering.zocdoc.com/post/19991240421/winter-hackat...) and it really is great. We start thursday evening and finish on sunday, there are definitely late nights but plenty of sleep. The timespan is more than reasonable to finish a project. Definitely the best way to do a hackathon.
Re: Hackathon No More
#26I never try to kill my self at Hackathons. Go to sleep when you are tired and dont eat crap. At some point you are bound to get only diminishing returns, you should know this by now if you are all grown up.
Re: Hackathon No More
#27Don't just stop joining hackathons but select what suits you.
for e.g. events organised by Startupweekend (http://startupweekend.org/) They start on Friday evening and end Sunday evening exactly what you asked!
Re: Hackathon No More
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always sugar-free Red Bull which is preferable to the sugary default kind, but I like high-quality green tea. After you wean yourself off the hard caffeine spikes of coffee or Red Bull, you realise green tea contains trace amounts of caffeine, enough to get you over the hump after your body readjusts. It's also antioxidant-rich.
I agree with the sugar-free, but often they replace it with something worse. Actually anything natural, organic food is stimulating the body, while anything artificial, fabricated food is destroying the body. So if you want to hack along with a sharp mind, keep your mind in shape by replenishing the body with what it needs. Period.
Seems like quite an over-generalization. I agree that a rational Bayesian approach would favor organic foods, because thousands of years of natural selection is probably a better indicator than laboratory tests of long-term low-dose toxicities and important but uncommon complex molecules in food supplies. But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of natural substances that are damaging to the human body even in moderation.
Re: Hackathon No More
#29Lean Startup Machine takes the three-day approach and it works extremely well.
Re: Hackathon No More
#3048 or 72 hours total time spent developing an application should be ample time to have something bootstrapped. I don't mean 3 days, I mean total time working on a project.
I've found that if I go over the 72 hour mark, I begin to lose interest