"Hackathons are nonsense" ...
... for trying to achieve /what/ excactly?
Nuance. I know. Nuance is overrated. Especially on the interwebs. Sorry about that.
Hackathons are nonsense
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is commonly known as cheating. I'm fairly confident it doesn't happen very much.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about some game, not hackathons.
Most of those I attend are aimed at competing over what you can create in x hours. If you've spent a week beforehand building it to present then it is essentially cheating. So yes, it is really a game.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#63We just had a very successful hackathon where I work. About 10 separate teams coded basically overnight and the results I think surprised everybody. There was something about the energy and, well, slight insanity of staying up all night just to see if we could deliver a full product in under 20 hours...there was definitely something to it. The demo the next morning, where all the teams showed what they had done was p…
Seems like it's similar to physically going to conferences and focusing on some topic 100%, instead of just watching the same video streams and presentations at home.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#64Hackathons are not the nonsense in this piece, the author's assumption that hackathon projects are expected to be actual business-ready products, that's the nonsense. The author is really shooting himself in the foot and missing the point of hackathons: they are about experimentation and practice. > However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out…
Where did you get the idea that that was my assumption?
My feet are just fine, btw. :-)
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#65Let me ask you guys a questions, the people who say that Hackathons are great.
Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done.
And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face talking with people. The level of concentration required is blown by just one conversation.
Why not other structures for collaborative development?
I like taking one-hour walks with people I'm working with. Lots reason this works really well.
Demos are good too -- for sure. I could see a meetup where people got together to do one-on-one demos of projects they're currently working on.
I suspect that's what people are really doing btw at hackathons. :-)
If you go back and look at my piece and read the first sentence, you might get an idea of how I approached this.
It was just a blog post, btw, not a manifesto!
People here are reading way too much into it.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#66Hackathons are not the nonsense in this piece, the author's assumption that hackathon projects are expected to be actual business-ready products, that's the nonsense. The author is really shooting himself in the foot and missing the point of hackathons: they are about experimentation and practice. > However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out…
Where did you get the idea that that was my assumption? My feet are just fine, btw. :-)
Indeed, you don't explicitly make that assumption. It's just the only one I could think of that would make any sense of your leap from "quality software takes a long time to make" to "hackathons are nonsense". If you won't warrant that assumption, then I don't know what the point of the article is.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#67Let me ask you guys a questions, the people who say that Hackathons are great. Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done. And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face tal…
I like the idea of getting together to demo stuff you are working on more than hackathons.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#68Let me ask you guys a questions, the people who say that Hackathons are great. Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done. And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face tal…
> People here are reading way too much into it.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#69Let me ask you guys a questions, the people who say that Hackathons are great. Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done. And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face tal…
> People here are reading way too much into it. You are Dave Winer. How can you expect people to not read into it, especially one with such a provocative title?
Okay I hate to tell you this -- but you're reading too much into my telling you not to read too much into the other thing. :-)
Who said I didn't expect them to do it!
Of course they're going to do it.
And of course I'm going to say they're doing it.
And of course someone is going to ask how can you expect people to not read into it, especially one with such a provocative title?
Conclusion: Life is wonderful!! :-)
No sarcasm, this is fun.
Re: Hackathons are nonsense
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
as a regular long run runner and coder, I totally agree with you. For training, not only building base is important, if you wanna achieve a good pace during marathon, running fast like a blast is part of it. More detailed, we basically have 4 phases for training. 1)acclimatizing phase, 2)building-up phase, 3)overall preparation phase, and 4)special preparation phase. Hacktons are more like phase 4, not so accurate an…
Hackathons are more like fartleks, no?
yeah, right. usually I call it interval. But you are right. this is the right term.