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Hackathons are bad for you

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Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#51

Post by klausa »

jrockway wrote: post #15

Caffeine isn't a diuretic if you use it regularly. From Wikipedia: "Regular users of caffeine have been shown to develop a strong tolerance to the diuretic effect, and studies have generally failed to support the notion that ordinary consumption of caffeinated beverages contributes significantly to dehydration, even in athletes."

To support you more, from [1]:

"Contrary to popular belief, caffeine does not act as a diuretic when consumed in moderation (less than five cups a day or 500 to 600 milligrams), and does not lead to dehydration or to a water-electrolyte imbalance; current evidence suggests that caffeinated beverages contribute to the body's daily fluid requirements no differently from pure water."

This particular misconception is kind of a pet peeve of mine, and it drives me nuts how widespread it is.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_coffee#Laxati...

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#52

Post by thisone »

jbackus wrote: post #35
jonascopenhagen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would disagree with that point then. Staying up most of the night and therefore sleep depriving yourself will make you less cognitively able the next morning compared to if you slept 8 hours, but the amount you are able to write in the time you chose to stay up outweighs the slight increase in productivity you would have the next morning from sleeping all night.

I'm not sure code quantity equates to code quality.

But then again, I'm a believer in the shower school of epiphany. Have a sticky problem, take a shower, suddenly figure out solution to problem.

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#53

Post by Isofarro »

scottporad wrote: post #47
kevinconroy wrote: post #4

Hackathons run by companies have always seemed to me to be a way for them to unleash creative thinking without having to devote significant company time to it or make strategic tradeoffs. The best companies find a way to build the spirit of hackathons into the daily culture and provide scheduled, dedicated time to do this during normal business hours. That being said, if you're young and have no kids then hackathons…

"Hackathons run by companies have always seemed to me to be a way for them to unleash creative thinking without having to devote significant company time to it or make strategic tradeoffs." Yes. The internal hackathons I've been involved with have taught me a lot about a) problems developers face that they're motivated to fix, and b) areas developers are personally interested in and motivated to put forth some effort…

The internal hackathons at Yahoo (Europe) were essentially an exercise in futility. They jumped on the hackathon bandwagon, but were unprepared to deal with the after effects of a hackday - what to do with these ideas.

From what I saw, hackday was used to pretend the organisation cared about the ideas of it's engineers and web developers, but at a safe enough distance not to affect their product roadmap. When push came to shove we were all enthusiastically encouraged to patent our ideas, because it protects us from evil people stealing all our ideas. Naturally I refused.

The Yahoo Open Hackdays also, was an exercise in futility. Yahoo didn't do anything with ideas generated, or encouraged the people who attended and built something. It was just a two day event over a weekend where a venue was populated by groups of people who may be building something, or not. Esssentially it was just a marketing ploy to get developers using the Yahoo APIs for a weekend.

Looking at that, these hackdays offered no value. I don't need a hackday / hack-weekend to work on ideas I consider interesting. I don't need to be in a noisy drafty building where the roof opens up during a thunderstorm ( http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/06/hack_day_... ).

I gave up on the internal hackdays, after participating in two: winning one, and getting a notable mention for the second. Ideas are no good gathering dust on the shelf. And all hackdays accomplished was for the company to have an inkling on the ideas I was working on in my own time, so they could decide to claim ownership if they liked.

Open Hackdays are only useful to meet up with people you haven't seen for a long time. So having free beer and pizza is useful, I guess.

To be honest, the things I did gain from being at an open hackday:

* Watching James Aylett build a social network from scratch, and fully unit-tested. That demolished most of my reservations of unit-testing and development agility.

* Meeting some of fine Yahoo US folk during that time: Ryan Kennedy and Dav Glass.

* The internal hackday win led me to meeting David Filo to give him a quick demo. Not often I meet people who are also Wikipedia entries.

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#54

Post by jbackus »

qdot76367 wrote: post #29
jbackus wrote: post #27

Health isn't everyone's first priority. It certainly shouldn't be viewed as a first priority in every context.

Yup, which is why those of us that do care about our health just can't wait to maintain the code of those that feel this way after they either die young or end up feeble and unable to maintain themselves much less their projects! Your brain and whatever else on your body you're currently using to get code from brain to computer are surrounded by a lot things that are important to keep them running and talking to each…

Yup, and I never said I was advocating extremities either. I'm simply pointing out that short cuts can be appropriate some times.

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#55

Post by lutusp »

jbackus wrote: post #54
qdot76367 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, which is why those of us that do care about our health just can't wait to maintain the code of those that feel this way after they either die young or end up feeble and unable to maintain themselves much less their projects! Your brain and whatever else on your body you're currently using to get code from brain to computer are surrounded by a lot things that are important to keep them running and talking to each…

Yup, and I never said I was advocating extremities either. I'm simply pointing out that short cuts can be appropriate some times.

> Yup, and I never said I was advocating extremities [sic] either.

What -- you're against the idea of fingers and toes? Or did you mean "extremes"?

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

Part of the confusion here is that, I think, people treat different kind of hackatons differently. I took part in 48-hour coding contests long before they were even called 'hackatons' (back then we called them Jams). Those are some of the best coding experiences in my life. Working in small teams on something fun and creative with tight deadline was absolutely exhilarating and reinvigorating. But there's one caveat.

We did this by ourselves, for ourselves. For fun.

What I personally strongly dislike are the 'company hackatons', in which developers from a company are basically tricked to do some unpaid work for the company. In my opinion, it's dishonest. You can feel the difference in the air - events that are created by the dev community for themselves to play and improve just smell different than the ones started by managers.

So for me, the problem with hackatons boils down to the problem of "fun" vs. "work". Things started as fun, but they seem to be turning more and more into work. Just like in case of SEO and the Web, it's all great until someone from outside comes who wants to profit on this, and this is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#57

Post by zestyping »

The most serious problem with hackathons is that many of them create the misconception that anyone can build a product in a weekend. Most cannot.

A few can build a great prototype; an even smaller miniscule few can build a product. But most hackathon participants produce either no code at all or terrible code.

This is fine if all you want is to make friends or build working relationships or make a throwaway prototype.

But, if you want to make a lasting code contribution, it's almost certainly got to be a small feature or bugfix on an established project, for which the problem definition, skill set required, and relevant parts of the codebase were documented in some detail before the hackathon. Very few hackathons have this level of preparation.

Better preparation or better expectation-setting -- that's what is needed.

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#58

Post by thisone »

spullara wrote: post #34

...said by someone that is no good at hackathons. :) 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.

I find it odd that internal motivation could be so low that someone would need to wait for an external motivation, like a hackathon, in order to do something they wanted to do, like learn something new or challenge themselves.

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#59

Post by cpressey »

Isofarro wrote: post #53
scottporad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hackathons run by companies have always seemed to me to be a way for them to unleash creative thinking without having to devote significant company time to it or make strategic tradeoffs." Yes. The internal hackathons I've been involved with have taught me a lot about a) problems developers face that they're motivated to fix, and b) areas developers are personally interested in and motivated to put forth some effort…

The internal hackathons at Yahoo (Europe) were essentially an exercise in futility. They jumped on the hackathon bandwagon, but were unprepared to deal with the after effects of a hackday - what to do with these ideas. From what I saw, hackday was used to pretend the organisation cared about the ideas of it's engineers and web developers, but at a safe enough distance not to affect their product roadmap. When push ca…

This (and several other comments in this discussion) make the hackathon held last year by the company I work for, look like a wild success.

* held on a weekday (so it wasn't asking salaried employees to come in and "work for free" on a weekend)

* engaged the whole company, not just the technical employees

* no expectation that you had to go for the full 24 hours straight

* no expectation that you'd finish anything but a prototype in those 24 hours

* a plan in place to follow up on the most successful ideas and prototypes that were worked on (and that plan has largely been kept up)

Re: Hackathons are bad for you

#60

Post by wreckimnaked »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #33

All of these are valid criticisms, but in my mind a hackathon is a treat: pizza, soda and staying up all night is fun sometimes, regardless of whether you play Halo, watch movies, or write a cool app. I agree with a lot of the comments that say you can't get much done; it's mostly a case of connecting existing libraries and data sources to create a sort of 'mash-up'. That said, being able to prototype quickly is an a…

Hackatons are fun. I don't get the point of saying that hanging out with people with similar, drinking beer and eating pizza is somehow bad for you. Maybe is about seeing it less as a competition and more like a regular social event.
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