21–30 of 154 posts
Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
> We wired a Raspberry Pi... > ...the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code... > ...iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task... The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware? Since the advent of SBCs and microcontroller kits, software devs have felt the same way about hardware being trivial. Yet, a hardware engineer still makes a massive differ…
It's the rotary phone and the raspberry pi, of course. Don't gatekeep.
The fact that microcontrollers are so cheap now means for most (but, sure, not all) applications they're strictly superior in every way compared to e.g. 555 timers and LM386 amplifiers, or whatever. This is because, critically, you can debug and reprogram a micro. To do the equivalent with a 555 timer means, at minimum, de-soldering a bunch of components and probably poking around with a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope.
What's more, you can get a full tcp/ip stack in a surprisingly small and low-power package these days. No need to futz with analog telemetry, or even SPI/I2C unless you really need to.
The "hack" in TFHackathon is altering the function of a phone. Who cares if they used a ras pi to do it vs something else? In what possible way does that diminish their feat?
I like the fax machine idea. Reminds me of an idea I had. Get some receipt printers for my friends and we can print to each other's printers to send text messages
Can we kill the hackathon please? Yes I totally want to get nerd-sniped for some of my precious off time for some trivial reward. NOT Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
Can we kill the hackathon please? Yes I totally want to get nerd-sniped for some of my precious off time for some trivial reward. NOT Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
Is participation in your off time mandatory? If so, the problem is not hackathons. If not, why not just… not participate? The folks who do often enjoy working on the problems, networking, etc., so I’m not sure killing them all together is particularly fair to folks who do get a lot out of them.
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!
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 the stuff I really need to get better at and finally, I am. Slowly but also, provably.
Also, this problem is unique: I call it "the trailhead". You get deep into the problem (the trail) and forget what it looked like at the trailhead and thus fail to compel the product because you spend your time on the wrong level of details and the wrong aspects.
That's why you can pitch something not yours better then your own stuff.
We’re in the age of human hand crafted creativity.
Imperfections of value.
Can we kill the hackathon please? Yes I totally want to get nerd-sniped for some of my precious off time for some trivial reward. NOT Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.