31–40 of 128 posts
Health isn't everyone's first priority. It certainly shouldn't be viewed as a first priority in every context.
That said, being able to prototype quickly is an awesome skill, and it completely exercises different parts of my skillset than my normal job. Going from coding a large C application, to hacking together a Ruby app is a very refreshing experience. Maybe if you spend your whole day working on the same stack in the same domain, it's less fun.
Finally, it's a good way to get something you've had in mind done. If your whole life isn't made of crunches, the occasional high-stress, urgent deadline situation is (once again) a welcome change. For people who work under these conditions all the time, yeah, it's probably not fun.
Honestly though, hack on something you can finish in a few hours and go home and come back the next day to tell people about it. I'm still running twickery.com from the last F8 opengraph hackathon I went to. Spent a few hours and still use it now.
Hackathons give you an excuse to scratch an itch, learn something new and challenge yourself.
Health isn't everyone's first priority. It certainly shouldn't be viewed as a first priority in every context.
If the first priority is good code, the author's point still stands. He's saying that you'll produce better code if you have a healthy lifestyle.
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Hackathons may or may not be for you. Try it once. Don't stay the whole time if you don't want. If they aren't for you, don't go again. If they are, great, have an awesome time.
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For some reason, they're touted as this end-all be-all social event that if you don't go to YOU ARE MISSING OUT AND YOU WILL NEVER RECOVER. As many people posted here, the situation's combination of adrenaline and seratonin depletion gets people into some pretty seriously fucked mental states that causes odd group dynamics. Some will thrive on this. Some hate it.
Case in point: I grew up in the rural midwest, but had computers. So computers are something I deal best with in situations with little to no people around. Hackathons are the opposite of that. Took me like, 2 attendances to realize that, and now I just avoid them. Hell, I even avoid career situations that put me in that environment, because I don't work well there.
Not to say I haven't pulled some insanely stupid hours in my time, but I still even did most of those alone, and I'll continue to do so.
> Working late into the night and not sleeping for days is lauded and almost considered a necessity by many these days. > And leaving long-term health out of the equation, lack of sleep hasn’t been known to improve your focus or the ability to be logical or creative, all of which are critical skills for developers. For me personally, I code late at night because it's the only time during the day when I can truly be d…
I just wish I didn't have to get up again in the morning.
At my last job I worked at a YC startup where the entire codebase was written in the 3 months leading up to demo day when the team was under a lot of time pressure. Sure it worked fine as a demo, but with the pace of startup land this same code was then thrown into production and as the startup grew the codebase couldn't quite keep up. There weren't many catastrophic failures but there ended up being a lot of patchin…
Regarding unfamiliar technologies, choose a stack you're used to (that way, you don't waste time debugging/googling how to do something) and use whatever helps you get things done fast. If anything, have one unknown thing in the mix so you can take advantage of the learning opportunity. Just make sure that thing is necessary for the product you're working on of course - for example, use mongodb's geospatial indexes for that geo-aware app, or try out d3 for those nifty interactive charts, or use websockets/zeromq for a real-time system.