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Frankly, I've always felt they were a great way for engineers to play product people, get the juices flowing and just try to get something created in a very short amount of time. It can be the equivalent of chicken soup for the engineering soul.
Dave obviously saw something or experienced something that rubbed him the wrong way and then indirected a few too many times to post this nonsense rant. In general hackathons are mostly about programmers and builders having fun. Can marketing people abuse hackathons? Yes. Can marketing people abuse anything? Yes. So just tell us what's really bothering you.
Personally, I attend hackathons because they are fun. It feels great to be surrounded by others who are motivated to do really cool things. Not to mention we are usually all armed with energy drinks and endless amounts of food.
I will say that I, as a physics student, mentally crunched the numbers in my head when I saw a recent Wired article. It said: Consider the action around Apple’s iOS alone: Since its 2007 debut, 500,000 applications have generated $3 billion for developers. (Android’s 400,000 apps have earned around $100 million.) ... It costs $5,000 to throw an event for 100 participants—a tiny investment considering the payoff if a…
PS. I'm the Zac Bowling from that article.
> However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out on other users, learning, thinking, more trial and error, and on and on.
The whole point of a hackathon is practicing and experimenting with some of those or other aspects of software development in an environment where the quality of the product isn't that important. The product doesn't have "to be any good" for it to be a successful hackathon project!
The ill-recieved Facebook timeline comes to mind:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/building...
One could easily say this support's the author's argument, but it doesn't really evidence that hackathons are nonsense, just that hackathon projects are often not viable business-wise. It's great if they are, but that shouldn't be the point.
I liken programming to that process. There's a fair amount of intention and consideration that goes into composition. With activities, such as pair programming, I argue that is possible to see inside a creator's head.
The benefit of participating in a hackathon is fluidity. There are monolithic projects for which the hackathon was not designed to address. But, at the end of the day, you're a better problem solver by working under the constraints of that kind of environment.
I disagree. Hackathons are sprints, and just like have the occasional sprint workout can be a great way to augment your distance running routine, hackathons can be great for augmenting your software development routine. Here are some reasons why I like taking part in a hackathon event (assuming the goal is to produce some sort of web application): - Tradeoffs are easy. You have no time for bells or whistles. You cons…
And Hackathons are very distinct from software sprints. The later being the business end of a lot of design, architecting and planning with clear goals.
Hackathons are the opposite of "how marketing people think software is made". They are the essence of the process of development with the decoration removed. Dave must not have been to a good hackathon. I've personally been involved in hackatons where we created what went on to become a commercial product in under a day. The code written during the hackathon may not have been part of the final product, but the creati…
By using Startup Weekend to create a MVP, we were able to switch the discussion from "What if we could..." to "We've built the product. What do you think?" Before we had even incorporated, teachers and administrators who saw the before and after could rest assured we could implement on our vision and continue to iterate on it.