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RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

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Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#81

Post by pelagicAustral »

The conference scene is not doing that much better either.

I begrudgingly went to one a few months ago and I was absolutely shocked, it was a two-day one, not even going to mention the programming language because at this point it probably doesn't matter, since only about 20% (tops) of the talks/presentations were strictly about programming.

A small assemble of self-defined industry champions took the floor once after the other to preach about their holiness and the outstanding work they have done for the community in areas that bordered software engineering as much as Iceland limits the Indian Ocean.

It was lecture after lecture, it was lifestyle, it was virtue-signaling, it was everything but programming. There was a single ham-fisted workshop that did not even had enough time to build on the basics of what was trying to accomplish, and there was a guy who I had as a personal hero of sorts that went in there to talk about some internal package manager drama.

NEXT! never again. It's all rotten to the core.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#82

Post by torginus »

le-mark wrote: post #14

Hackathons turned into “nice ui with mock data”-athons. Whoever got the best ui person on their team won. I benefitted from this a few times!

Yes, I ran into this during an internal company hackathon. This was before LLMs.

We took a problem, designed an internal tool for it, and put some Bootstrap UI on top with some fancy CSS animations.

After wiring up the mock data, it looked convincigly real.

We did win, got congratulated by upper management, and were immediately asked if we could get this into production in a week, or do we need 2?

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#84

Post by klustregrif »

axegon_ wrote: post #71

Makes perfect sense, all things considered. I've only joined a handful of hackathons. My best experience was in Amsterdam in like 2022, where half our team went to sleep and me and another guy spent the entire night locked up in a venue with 200 other people building stuff and bashing our heads against the table, looking for optimizations, hacks, half-assed solutions to near-impossible problems. In recent years, I've…

> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal?

Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#86

Post by axegon_ »

klustregrif wrote: post #84
axegon_ wrote: post #71

Makes perfect sense, all things considered. I've only joined a handful of hackathons. My best experience was in Amsterdam in like 2022, where half our team went to sleep and me and another guy spent the entire night locked up in a venue with 200 other people building stuff and bashing our heads against the table, looking for optimizations, hacks, half-assed solutions to near-impossible problems. In recent years, I've…

> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in bui…

It's what I call "speed running towards watering plants with Gatorade".

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#87

Post by qsera »

klustregrif wrote: post #84
axegon_ wrote: post #71

Makes perfect sense, all things considered. I've only joined a handful of hackathons. My best experience was in Amsterdam in like 2022, where half our team went to sleep and me and another guy spent the entire night locked up in a venue with 200 other people building stuff and bashing our heads against the table, looking for optimizations, hacks, half-assed solutions to near-impossible problems. In recent years, I've…

> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in bui…

But the winner didn't remove the tree. They just built a an AI team of tree-cutters...

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#88

Post by makapuf »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #78
yieldcrv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen powerpoint presentations win, and that was my last hackathon

I did a 3-month bootcamp back in the day and the top assessed final presentations were a powerpoint and some bs JS "game" that indeed was a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code. This was a Rails bootcamp, not a powerpoint one, not a js one...

"a bunch of nice graphics being manipulated with code" does sum up quite a bit of the videogame industry, including GTA VI ...

Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

#90

Post by hard_times »

deadbabe wrote: post #24

On the contrary, I think software hackathons could really hit a golden age where we see how far people can push the limits of what we ever thought possible within 24 hours or a weekend through the use of AI. Less “pretty UI with mock data” and more fully working products ready for the consumer market.

Ah yes, the eternal truth of "looks matter". It translates to almost everything imaginable, not just people's appearance.
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