121–130 of 154 posts
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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.
To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.
All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
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To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.
Absolutely. Which is why the hackathon was conceived: to serve as an escape from the real world. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer?
> How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer? In this case, Hardware hackathon means wiring up the digital or analog input/output pins of an Arduino/Raspberry pi to something and writing software to control/interface with it. Perhaps with a few simple components on a prototype board
as someone who got into linux and open source in the early 90s I will never stop being sad that "hackathon" morphed into a competitive activity, rather than "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively". I guess the latter tends to get called a "dev sprint" these days, but it's always the first thing I think of when I hear "hackathon"
I'm ok with them. It's all the stuff I'm weak on: pitching, making eye-contact, telling convincing stories, and engaging audience. I suck at this. Making people feel my pain or communicating effectively quickly I'm total garbage at. Hackathons are now only this. They have turned into an exercise that highlights my core weaknesses and that's why 25 years into my career I'm going to them almost every weekend. This is t…
I feel your way some times too, and when I reframe it and share with others from a place of interest and passion and let go of performance & anxiety, I usually don't come across as total garbage.
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> How does that work if a digikey order takes 1-2 days, and ordering a PCB even longer? In this case, Hardware hackathon means wiring up the digital or analog input/output pins of an Arduino/Raspberry pi to something and writing software to control/interface with it. Perhaps with a few simple components on a prototype board
We did this once at a traditional hackathon - we took a food dehydrator and wired up a temp sensor and raspberry pi, wrote PID controls and turned it into a 3D printer filament dryer.
They should organize this and show us how it is done :)
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> 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 proble…
I get that… but that’s basically a startup pitching competition. It’s not a hackathon.
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But the winner didn't remove the tree. They just built a an AI team of tree-cutters...
That may not actually cut trees.
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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?
Corporate "hackatons" are often a mess. We have anything from a truly novel ideas clearly invented right at the hackaton (as was originally intended) which are rough and very unpolished and buggy or even broken, to teams brazenly bringing up developments which clearly were ongoing for months, not even hiding that and showing weeks or months of test and dev results in the eventual presentation. The latter teams won of…
"-thons" aren't contests, at least not in the traditional sense, they are activities where participants test the limits of their endurance. A marathon, for example, allows runners to see how far they can push themselves running. Likewise, a hackathon gives a place for one to see how far they can push themselves to create something over a short amount of time, beyond what would normally be possible, and beyond what would be sustainable in an everyday setting. I suppose you could argue that it is contest with yourself, but calling that a contest is atypical.
You are right to call out that few people want to push themselves to their limits for a corporate event, so corporate entities have turned to contests instead to try and find something that does appeal, but a contest, no matter how it is conducted, is outside of the spirit of a hackathon.
The other presentation that stuck out, iirc, became leet codes.