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How to attend a hackathon

dickey.xxx

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: How to attend a hackathon

#31
post #24
post #5

Don't ever get a domain with .xxx if you aren't going to create what it's meant for. Damn site is blocked at my work place.

Interesting, .xxx could be a useful way to filter out corporate types, I'm wondering when that might be useful.

It seems like a pretty broad brush to equate "people with workplace filters" with "corporate types".

For example, I'm a guy with a CS degree who is a high school teacher. Does that make me a "corporate type"?

Re: How to attend a hackathon

#32
post #12

He lost me when he started talking about Startup Weekend. Some people may find that kind of thing fun, but sorry that's not a hackathon. I went to one a few weeks ago, and bailed when I realized business school students and hustlers out-numbered engineers 4 to 1. Entire teams of 7-8 people formed that didn't have a single technical person on them. I checked back with a friend afterwards, and apparently none of the to…

Yeah, from what I heard about of the Melbourne startup weekend it made more sense for a team to do so mockups and work on a business plan an pitch than to write my code. In terms of winning at least.

I am a big fan of the global games jam held at 100s of venues across the world in January. Games are great because the results are mainly about the execution on the weekend and unlike building a web app and getting customers there isn't really any ongoing commitment unless you really want to continue with it.

Re: How to attend a hackathon

#37
post #18
post #12

He lost me when he started talking about Startup Weekend. Some people may find that kind of thing fun, but sorry that's not a hackathon. I went to one a few weeks ago, and bailed when I realized business school students and hustlers out-numbered engineers 4 to 1. Entire teams of 7-8 people formed that didn't have a single technical person on them. I checked back with a friend afterwards, and apparently none of the to…

I had the exact same experience. I basically had to join up with 4 B-School students and work my ass off on their ideas which weren't interesting (and I couldn't play with anything technologically interesting since I didn't really have the time). By the end of saturday I realized I was burning myself out on something that I had no interest in and told them I quit (for fear of burning myself out for my actual job). It…

I've attended a flock of Startup Weekends - Austin, DC, Houston - and was one of the organizers of the last one here in Austin.

The mix of attendees & skill sets is both the hardest and most important thing. The approach we took was multi-faceted:

- we announced it quietly to the tech groups first - mobile dev, rails, php, python, etc - with an embargo on tweeting it;

- once we started spreading the word further, we made a very small number of non-technical/non-designer tickets available;

- once those were sold out, we put the entire event into waitlist mode.. from then on, to buy a ticket, you had to send us a Linked In profile to prove your background.

And once we opened it back up to business people, we wanted to get the most motivated, so we asked everyone on the list to make a 1 minute video pitch on why they should get a ticket.. and then tweet it to us with the event hashtag. Most didn't bother making a video, so the decision was simple.

The result was a good mix of people and the non-technical people were very motivated and (probably) felt lucky to be there.

My 0.02.

Re: How to attend a hackathon

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the exact same experience. I basically had to join up with 4 B-School students and work my ass off on their ideas which weren't interesting (and I couldn't play with anything technologically interesting since I didn't really have the time). By the end of saturday I realized I was burning myself out on something that I had no interest in and told them I quit (for fear of burning myself out for my actual job). It…

I've attended a flock of Startup Weekends - Austin, DC, Houston - and was one of the organizers of the last one here in Austin. The mix of attendees & skill sets is both the hardest and most important thing. The approach we took was multi-faceted: - we announced it quietly to the tech groups first - mobile dev, rails, php, python, etc - with an embargo on tweeting it; - once we started spreading the word further, we…

That seems like a good approach. I'm not against spending a weekend working with Biz Dev folks as there is lots I can learn from them, but in my SW (Honolulu) it was mostly inexperienced B-school students and they outnumbered devs at least two to one (and of around 80 people I think there was 3 designers!)

Re: How to attend a hackathon

#39
post #17

Awesome. Dickey + I built weft.io for the last Angelhack (a couple weeks ago). We didn't win, but we definitely did a lot of things we were proud of.

That seems pretty cool. Do you have a prototype?

We kinda do -- it's ugly as hell, though (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/63726/weft-presentation.pdf)

Re: How to attend a hackathon

#40
post #12

He lost me when he started talking about Startup Weekend. Some people may find that kind of thing fun, but sorry that's not a hackathon. I went to one a few weeks ago, and bailed when I realized business school students and hustlers out-numbered engineers 4 to 1. Entire teams of 7-8 people formed that didn't have a single technical person on them. I checked back with a friend afterwards, and apparently none of the to…

I've been to three startup weekends and they seem to vary greatly depending on who puts them on.

First one I went to was in a college town in Michigan (East Lansing). The organizer was still a student and so were most of the attendees. It was very much a hackathon with a focus on building something in 2 and half days. My team had an iphone, mac, and web app working and we won "crowd favorite" and "coolest"

The second one I did was in Seattle. Lots of developers were there, but the teams that did the best didn't necessarily have the most functional code. Still, everyone had some sort of prototype, many of them quite polished.

The third I did was an internal Microsoft Startup Weekend (although still put on by the folks at Startup Weekend). It was dominated by business type people, although there were a decent amount of developers. The judges essentially ignored the fact that anyone had running code and went solely on people's slide decks.

As a developer, I enjoyed the first one the most by far.

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