Hackathons are nonsense

As well, I'm pretty sure a lot of the "hacks" you see come out of hackathons are actually projects that were well underway before the event.

This is commonly known as cheating. I'm fairly confident it doesn't happen very much.

While some people think "building the software" is the goal, I don't think it is.

In my opinion, the real underlying goal is to get people out of their normal environment for a day or weekend, make everyone think differently, prioritize everything, and build connections within the local community. There are very few non-purely-social events that cross programming languages, tech communities, and geographies. Hackathons serve that purpose nicely.

When I close out a Hackathon, I always ask "who lives in this city or within 10 miles of here?" Nearly everyone raises their hand. Then I tell them: "Regardless of how these demos go, you met a bunch of people who live, work, and make things happen right here in your area. While we'll see what you did today, I'm more interested in what you do going forward. There's no reason these relationships have to die tonight."

Disclosure:

* I'm a Developer Evangelist at Twilio and run, assist, etc Hackathons, Hackdays, etc all over the place.. the most recent was an API Hackday here in Austin yesterday. And I basically said the above.

* My coworking space - HubAustin - launched from Startup Weekend a year ago and after four months of operation, we're 2/3 of the way to being profitable.

For me it's also not about "building software" it's a mix of things like trying out a new technology. Creating a proof of concept that I can work later on (maybe for years ;-) But one of the most important things: Work with other people. Feel their workflow. At Hackathons there is lot of intense energy and in the end it's about us and not any marketing guys.

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 consider a basic feature list and start working. If a feature starts to take too long to implement it, you just axe it. You probably end up with something that doesn't have many bells and whistles, but the key distinction is you end up with something. I can't tell you had some many side projects I've worked on had some painfully implemented bell that was pretty cool, but was pointless because I never got any core functionality working.

- All you can do is use what you know. In one hackathon group I was in, I was the guy who ended up knowing the most sysadmin/web server stuff, and the guy who knew the most HTML/CSS/JS. So I basically did my best to manage through installing/configuring everything at the server software level, and then mucked around with some CSS templates trying to shoehorn it around my team's application code. I spent the whole time out of my comfort zone, on two very disparate pieces, and it was great. Here was an environment that required me to do nothing else but pick up those technical skills, in a very focused time period, with tangible results if I did. Much more effective than all those times I'd think, "hmm maybe I'll play around with jQuery more" and never did.

To go back to the running analogy, good software development is like running a marathon. It takes time and discipline, not preparing effectively usually means you'll end up going slower or being injured, and it's all about a steady incremental process that builds up into something great. But sometimes it just feels good to toss out your planned 20 mile run for the day, and just run out your front door and sprint around the block as hard as you can for 10 minutes, pushing yourself in a different way and learning something about your skills or capabilities that you never would otherwise.