Last hackathon I went to our team was beaten by a group that produced a PowerPoint presentation. I have no interest in doing that any more
But... like, how? Was it that interesting of a powerpoint?
They also vibe-coded a PowerPoint clone ;-)
RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
101–110 of 154 posts
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#102Makes 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…
Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
That may not actually cut trees.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#104The height of hackathons was back in the early to mid 2010s in my opinion. That was the height of the indie game scene and mobile app goldrush - and there were plenty of sponsors willing to contribute real $$, prizes, and swag - all of which were necessary to build the excitement around the event.
I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).
But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#105Makes 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…
10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking about, and talking with confidence was all it took.
We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#106You get what you incentivize. Just go back to the roots and remove any and all judging and awards. The incentive should be to get things done in a project, not to “win” a hackathon.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#107Makes 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…
Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.
> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
- Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design
I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#108The moment Opus 4.6 came into existence, the RIP was software with them and unfortunately now making software is ready. Even though thinking a particular solution in a hackathon still makes sense, when it comes to making real physical solutions now that makes no sense. That's why I get our day of hackathons like in the future.
Opus 4.6? More like Sonnet 3.5. The last Hackathon I did was almost 2 years ago. I was probably the only one there doing agentic coding, or at least I didn't meet anyone else who did (some people did ask questions to ChatGPT). We won. We wouldn't have won if I'd coded by hand.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#109Makes 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…
10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking a…
I mean, this is hardly surprising. Who takes the most points is an accumulative score from subjective opinions(judges, audience, etc.). We didn't win the one in Amsterdam but got second: Around 50 teams began, 20 managed to deliver something, even if the winner is picked at random, that's a 5% chance, which is a very high random chance. When you toss in several senior developers(who at the time worked together in the same company and team), a dedicated frontend developer, ux designer and a few others, second place no longer sounds that impressive, but we all had fun. But to my mind, the value of hackathons is(or rather 'was', given what I said above) forcing people to push their mental abilities to the limits. If being able to write coherent text is good enough to make you the top performer, then we clearly have a problem.
Re: RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That last bit is why I'll never do one again. Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "impro…
Yep, a way to get free work by pretending its fun, most corpos immediately turn around and do this.
It's also funny to me because of how they try to show its a treat to the engineering staff, and then railroad them as soon as they can to implement the half baked idea.
The truth is that most management don't ever get beyond half baked ideas and so trying to push you to make low quality crap is often their only move.