Of course not, assuming the goal is demo UX via UI behavior, it's far more expedient to mock backend dependencies on the front end. Is this supposed to be controversial?
Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
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Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#42I participiated once in a corporate sponsored hackathon and won with a slide show. Those hackathons have nowadays nothing to do with software development and i will never again participate in that. They are almost always about adding business value and some startup crap.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#43Depends on your idea. For example, if you're actually building a demo that requires collaborative features that others can try in real-time, backend can add a lot to the working and cool factor. Imagine you're making a skribbl.io clone, you can't just fake other user's live inputs.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#44I guess I don't disagree, but not sure I understand the point if all you need is one guy with a copy of illustrator/photoshop/whatever?
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#45Hackathons are jokes. I was once lured to one for building phone apps. The winning entry was a team with a PowerPoint. The judges were VC. They’re just fishing for ideas to fund. A great waste of time.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#46The last so-called hackathon I went to involved a bunch of idea guys sitting in a room talking about how cool their ideas were. One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough.
Like I did it for free man, can you at least try to say thank you.
I will say I do enjoy game jams, at least then we have something fun to play. I have no interest in prototyping an app for someone else to get rich.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#47> The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room. No, that's a Startup Weekend-type event: https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend . They rightfully don't call themselves hackathons. A hackathon should be related to software development, not entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with either, but la…
The term hackathon nowadays is almost never related to software development. You can win most "hackathons" with a powerpoint slide, doing actual programming won't win you a price.
Yeah, it shouldn't be this way but it is.
Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, the important thing is to recognize when a "hackathon" is actually a "pitchathon" (usually) and to not waste effort doing things that will go unappreciated at a pitchathon (namely, hacking).
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#48This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.
When it comes down to a 4 minute demo the engineering is irrelevant. Instead spend the time to pick the right words and tell a story with pretty pictures.
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#49This is true
but this is a disgrace to the whole idea of a hackathon and goes against the very spirit.
Business suit people should stop appropriating words from the tech space: what passes for a hackathon submission these days is a PowerPoint presentation with realistic click points. It's still a "deck" which is what they've always been doing
Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed
#50The last so-called hackathon I went to involved a bunch of idea guys sitting in a room talking about how cool their ideas were. One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough. Like I did it for free man, can you at least try to say thank you. I will say I do enjoy game jams, at least then we have something fun to play. I have no interest in prototyping an app for som…
> One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough.
Idea guys in a nutshell.