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Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

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Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#81

Post by beaconstudios »

Kaze404 wrote: post #12
repomies69 wrote: post #4

This 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.

I got baited into going to one of those once. I was promised the prospect of spending a dozen hours with friends building something cool, but halfway through I realized we were just doing free labor for one of Latin America's biggest banks and just left. I'm still longing for events where my friends and I can gather to build something cool, and game jams are the closest I ever got to that.

I think most of the creative energy of building things quickly rightly goes into game jams because they offer the potential of UX creativity, rapid iteration and a joyous product at the end. Coding up a web app can be fun but the output product is almost always business-y and I'd much rather play a dozen games in order to vote, than blank-slate setup a bunch of web apps.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#82

Post by baash05 »

repomies69 wrote: post #4

This 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.

I had a manager offer to put on a work hackathon. It was going to be 24 hours of design and code. I figured it would be fun, even if we were building something for the company, free reign micro project would be cool.. We ended up spending the time building something management wanted, and then playing poker. (I don't gamble so I was rather miffed) In the end, I think we spent about 4 hours coding up something the bosses wanted.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#85

Post by reducesuffering »

71a54xd wrote: post #39

Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience. The coolest thing I ever saw built at a hackathon in boston was a fellow NU student who built a filesystem that completely operated within network traffic flowing between a number of network switches. Totally novel, not fake tech backing a half-baked "business" idea with the IBM watson API. I stopped going to ha…

> Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience.

I agree. After a couple, the sheen wore off because a majority of the people there either attend hackathons all the time, trying to "win", and fork existing projects with slight variations everytime, or are unable to do anything at all. Wish there were some kind of rules about not using existing personal repo's.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#86

Post by orwin »

sbarre wrote: post #63
ketzo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The working hours thing alone is awesome -- it sends a signal that "this is a good and valuable thing that you're doing, even if no software for our business comes out of it"

Yep, and let me tell you it took negotiation with leadership to give so many people 2 days away from working on "deliverables" but in the end everyone was convinced that the team building and inspirational value was worth it.

My team managed to negociate half a day of internal presentation/keynote/formation each friday with the management and all the team (with one monitoring production and the whole team on call still). I thought at first it was interesting but without added value, i was wrong. Not only the teambuilding, but also understanding why your coworker work like they do, it help a lot. We also got a lot of hindsight on why stuff are build the way they are, why we have sometime /25, sometime /24 subnets, all historical debt origin, i think this is a net benefit for the business.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#88

Post by sbarre »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #70
sbarre wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Thanks for telling me what my hackathon should and should not be. Ultimately we do them as team building exercises, and so _our_ measure of success is about team engagement, participation and the enjoyment of the participants. Certain ideas absolutely inspire further work on our real roadmaps but that's never the goal. And so on our metrics, they are a success. But thanks for the feedback.

I'm not why you're turning combatative. I was pointing what _a_ hackathon should be as the rest of the comment section is discussing. You definitely should continue to measure what you like at your "hackathon"

You presented your _opinion_ as fact, as a direct reply to my message, and so I took it in that context, that it was about our hackathons.

Also then putting hackathon in quotes in your response, implying it's not a real hackathon somehow (again in your opinion), certainly doesn't help your case.

And so this all certainly comes across as a bit of a know-it-all attitude, if you're actually looking for constructive feedback on how to participate in discussions.

Re: Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

#89

Post by sbarre »

orwin wrote: post #86
sbarre wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and let me tell you it took negotiation with leadership to give so many people 2 days away from working on "deliverables" but in the end everyone was convinced that the team building and inspirational value was worth it.

My team managed to negociate half a day of internal presentation/keynote/formation each friday with the management and all the team (with one monitoring production and the whole team on call still). I thought at first it was interesting but without added value, i was wrong. Not only the teambuilding, but also understanding why your coworker work like they do, it help a lot. We also got a lot of hindsight on why stuff…

Absolutely! It's so easy in large (but I'm sure any size) orgs for teams to not appreciate or fully understand what other teams do, and what decisions get made and why.

It's certainly not necessary, but I agree with you that it can really help collaboration and decision-making even at the individual team level.

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