What is the experience like at a hackathon? Are you just sweating behind a computer screen or do you actually get time to socialize?
It has never been too appealing to me to work for a couple of days under time crunch, which is what I always thought hackathons were. The author has done over 30 of them though, so there must be something else that draws people in.
I've ran some student hackathons in the UK (worth noting we have a very different culture than the US scene) and we actually tried to discourage the whole working 24 hours straight thing.
Events are more just workshops / hanging out, with projects being more of a secondary thing.
I participated in a 24 hour hackathon. The first 8 hours or so were fun, the rest was scrambling to get by while drinking lots of Red Bull and thinking that I'd rather be home sleeping. Maybe it was just a particularly bad one, but it's not an experience I want to go through again.
I'm a very frequent game jam participant. At my first jam I crunched the whole time with tons of energy drinks, but after a few ones I decided to not use caffeine or any other stimulants (with possible exception at the very end) and to get plenty of sleep and water during the event instead. Never regretted.
Hahaha, that makes a lot of sense. I participated in a game jam recently as well and that was a great experience, and now that you mention it the fact that I was at home and had a nice 8 hours of sleep might have contributed to that.
There's usually quite a strong "time crunch" element. In my more snooty moods I say hackathons only teach bad habits and how to throw together software in a dreadfully hacky rushed manner. But in truth these are not always bad habits. Delivering a quick prototype to a tight deadline is a useful skill. I usually fail miserably at hackathons, which I find interesting. I think it means I should hone my dreadful hackery skills, because I can be too slow and considered and perfectionistic as a developer.
If it's all you practice, yeah you'll have had habits in longer software development. However, hackathons are good for figuring out how to reduce friction when you do need to sprint
I thought people bring stuff that’s almost done anyway, fiddle on it a bit, but mostly just socialize, then present the great thing they supposedly hacked together in the end.
haha! yes, that happened in my previous workplace. many people would keep fully-finished side projects , that they alone use everyday to save time, ready including fancy shiny ppts for "next quarter's hackathon"
Well sure, definitely. But at any prize that’s enough to be a sole reason for a person to enter a hackathon, imho that’s either 1) a poorly designed hackathon or 2) a really ugly way for a company to fund R&D.
I’ve never participated in a hackathon with a 1st prize worth over $500, and I’m not sure I’d want to. But I guess if I had a bunch of random unmonetized projects sitting around then entering them into high-prize-value hackathons could be a way to shop them around. I’m just not sure why an organization would call an event like that a “hackathon.”
Yeah that's been my impression at a lot of hackathons, but I think it has be accepted at least to some extent, as just "good preparation" rather than cheating. In fact I'd recommend doing it (Pre-wrangle the dataset into the format you need. Test out some tools. Prepare some components to assemble). I've only been organised enough to do this on a couple of occasions, but this way I've enjoyed the event more. More likely to achieve satisfactory hack project, and/or more time to socialise at the event.
It's whatever you want it to be. You can choose to turn up with winning as you're only goal, then spend a couple of sleepless days hammering things together. Personally I take it as an opportunity to play around with silly ideas a bit, but mostly drift around the place chatting with the other people about what they're doing.
Last time I did one I ended up not really attaching myself to a team at all because I had some family issues come up early in the weekend that needed sorting out, and I think that ended up being the most fun I've had at a hackathon - I spent the entire weekend just chatting to people, and occasionally helping out teams with issues they were having where I had some experience. It turned into a mentorthon, which is honestly much more satisfying.
I did a handful of hackathons before I transitioned from hobbyist coder to professional coder.
There were a ton of benefits to me personally.
I got to see a ton of different working styles and tech stacks. I got exposed to a lot of the more “playful” side of the technologist’s Internet. I got to see what it took to rapidly stand up a winning “demo,” while it being completely obvious to us (the winners) that we didn’t have the best idea OR best implementation of an idea.
Most of all, though, it was really fun to meet technologists from all walks of life and party with them, drinking too much alcohol and caffeine in a high-pressure environment. It made for a great way to bond with a bunch of people when I was otherwise just a disconnected hobbyist.
I think the tone of the hackathon is really important. I’ve only ever done non-profit based hackathons: art, civics, etc. where the central task is on the order of “what cool or fun thing can we do to make the world more beautiful, more fun, or just better?”
Also, it’s an excuse for people to try out ideas and stacks that they weren’t otherwise willing to give themselves time to explore.
I’d note that there are many different kinds of hackathons, which vary wildly in terms of length, ambition and seriousness, so everyone’s answer is going to be different.
At my previous employer, we did 2 hackathons a year. They were structured so that you could go hard on something you cared a lot about if you wanted to, or you could walk around checking out the (often pretty novel and cool) projects that the teams were working on. There was free food, karaoke, one time there was a cover band playing dance music. If you didn’t want to do a hackathon project, you could take a course on Lynda or Pluralsight, or just goof off and hang out. However, it was a sort of “enforced holiday” where normal day-to-day work was halted.
Sometimes people would work on an incremental quality-of-life improvement to the product that normally wouldn’t be prioritized, with the goal of actually getting them into the product. I’d usually start teams doing really ambitious projects with lots of whiz-bang stuff with the goal of getting the product folks to think bigger about where our product could go. It was a lot of fun, and I think more companies should run hackathons this way.
I consider hackathons and game jams where I didn't get to socialize to be failed ones. Some of the best ones where when I put together the whole project in last few hours.
Also, for some people working for a couple of days under time crunch is the best way to spark their creative output (which may or may not be a sign of possible ADHD, by the way ;])
If you want to do things according to the organizer's schedule, you can (e.g. mingle-code-pizza-nap-code-nap-breakfast-wander-code-wrap up-present) - and if you don't want to, you can not, also. You can write a single line of code, or a thousand. You can talk to no one, or you can only talk, if you want. The main conceivable reason for it to not be whatever you want it to be is if it's like something your company is making you go to, but even still I don't think you'd be forced to work / unable to socialize.
My team won with an idea that technically would not work the way it was proposed. Team 2 and 3 went on to found a successful company. Other than a free .me domain non of the winnings was useful for a company that would not work either way.
So yeah, what is winning, it only really ment we had the most charismatic presentation
In the early days of college hackathons (2011-2013), they were very much TechCrunch disrupt style. You were there to build something and win. Staff was incredibly unhelpful. It was the farthest thing from a learning experience I can remember.
If you're curious on how to ~actually~ win hackathons, I wrote up my experience winning 1st place at HackUVA (University of Virginia's 24-hour hackathon) and then coming to judge the hackathon the next year on behalf of Facebook (and seeing the competition from the other side of the proverbial table)
https://www.nicksingh.com/posts/win-hackathons-a-how-to-guid...
We've banned this account because it has been breaking the site guidelines a ton.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Small world, I won Best Mobile Hack at hack.UVA a few years ago :)
Notes:
- This was one of many I snuck into after I had dropped out of college
- It was a mobile app that let you scan an ISBN and would pirate the book for you. The results were sourced from your usual trackers, so 1% of the time it would work and 99% of the time you'd get <NSFW>.
I've actually won three separate hackathons, some of which had fairly large prizes (such as $5,000 in cash to our team).
Here's my quick list for how to win a hackathon:
1. Pick team mates who are rock stars (I had at least one "10X" programmer on each of my winning hackathon teams). This is probably the most important point. Nothing is more important than who you choose as a team mate.
2. Pick a project that is easy to explain that also captures peoples imagination. The more people that your idea resonates with, the better.
3. Make use of frameworks and toolkits. Now is NOT the time to learn a new language (if you want to win). The faster you can stand up a functioning prototype, the better.
4. Put together an awesome demo. I've literally seen someone win a hackathon with an amazing presentation and zero working code before. Don't underestimate the importance of the presentation!
For me a hackethon is about having fun. Period. In my company I organized multiple hackethons. As soon as Corona is less of an issue I will organize the next. I just rent a nice place for a weekend and we all come with our laptop and code in the weekend. And if you don't want to code; that's fine too. Once a colleague of mine was improving his rc airplane. We all watched him fly it. Some of us like to cook as well so that option is also on the table (pun intended).
My company takes a reasonable approach to this I think. The hackathon itself takes place Thursday and Friday, so it happens on work days. But the judging takes place Monday, so there's an obvious opportunity to continue to work over the weekend. No one has ever mentioned it though.
Also the whole C-suite takes part in the judging so it really is an opportunity to show off your work.
It's open for any one of us to join and completely voluntary. I worked on my private open source project that has nothing to do with my company on one of the hackethons. Since we host the hackethon in the weekend the costs of it are really low. Just the place, and some provisions. I work at a really small company of 5 people. We discuss everything with the entire staff. We have a monthly knowledge sharing session where we do mob programming for fun. We develop a small application just to learn how we each have a different development style. Loads of fun and very educational.
That sounds like the best kind of hackathon. I hate the corporate-sponsored ones, they're either "here's some food, come interview for us" if you're the public or "here's some food instead of overtime" if you're an employee.
Your kind sounds like the original spirit of the hackathon, just a bunch of people making things together.
When I worked at Riot Games they did something similar and it was fantastic. Twice a year for a couple of days the whole company stopped down to just work on cool stuff. Game projects were common of course.. but people would just kind of do whatever was cool to them. One of my favorite parts about working there.
In my past experience where I’ve won hackathons, coding has very little to do with winning. The goal should be to put together an amazing presentation and demo. This means writing just enough code to make everything look good, and certainly no point in putting together any sort of robust real world tech stack. It’s just a waste of time that won’t help you win.
Winning a Hackathon is more about impressing the audience than technical prowess. I've seen more Hackathons won with a presentation than I ever have with code.
About 5 years ago, I attended a hackathon, as I did every so often.
My team was comprised of CS undergrads and we made something that was technically interesting but not at all marketable. This was fine with us, as we were there to have fun. To us, that was "winning".
However, another team was clearly there to win. Their "leader" was a CS grad student, and they were developing an iOS app that would show you a random weighted complete graph. The task for the human was to build a hamiltonian cycle with minimum edge weight sum, i.e. they had to solve a TSP. Their app only showed very small graphs (<= 5 nodes IIRC) with significant edge weight disparities, such that it was usually trivial to find the correct solution. During their presentation they went on to say that they were using the solved puzzles as input for an AI that could then be used to solve larger TSPs. This was very interesting and valuable they said, as the TSP is relevant for delivery companies, logistics etc.
That grad student must have known that it was pure nonsense, but they actually won. There were people from pretty reputable tech companies in the jury, yet they won.
My teammates and I weren't mad though; to us, and some CS students from other teams who clearly knew what was going on, it was pretty funny.
I’m not a scientist, but we’re going to hire the best 100 scientists in the world and turn cheap dirt into valuable rechargeable light-weight batteries.
That doesn't sound that Theranos to me. Theranos was (at least in my opinion) a fantastic sell. Had they been able to pull if off it would have provided huge value to a lot of people.
The problem was that the technology was all fiction.
If your goal is to win a hackathon (or a game jam, or anything similar), your project is there only to support your presentation. It's how you sell your idea what gets you the price, not the project itself - it doesn't even have to work all that well as long as you present it right.
Of course details depend on the judging rules of the particular contest - you "market" your project differently when there's a panel of jurors and differently if it's the contesters that vote on each other's projects. In contests with panels of jurors you can often predict which project each jury member will likely vote on based solely on their professional background.
I've been to countless game jams and my first win (after a long while) was with a simple one-gimmick game that barely managed to not crash during the presentation. If you're there to have fun with technical stuff, you have small (but non-zero) chance of winning, because perfecting your presentation is rarely what people who go to hackathons for fun consider fun ;)
TBH, the best jams often have no voting and no prizes at all :)
I wonder if you might have misinterpreted it. It could have been that the grad student's team was also there for fun, but the game they were playing was "can we sell the judges on complete nonsense."
Honestly, that'd be a fun hackathon in of itself. You'd declare this the stated goal, and at the end of the hackathon there'd be big, dramatic presentations. You'd bring in a half dozen judges who would not be informed of the hackathon's purpose who would judge the projects in earnest, and you could have a couple more judges who'd be judging primarily on the audacity of the fiction.
Part of the problem is, the entire idea of making the “next big thing”, which will make millions of dollars, in just 48 hours is ridiculous. Even just coming up with the idea is kind of a stretch, but making any sort of prototype and presentation which would seek this idea is very, very rare.
I like the concept of a “game jam” better, because then you’re just making games. Or something like that, where the entire goal is to make a toy project. But then it’s harder to get approval and/or funding, I guess.
My team won a hackathon even though I had worked there for 3 weeks prior to the event. Why? We fixed all kinds of obscure and low priority bugs. I felt severe impostor syndrome afterwards, thinking I did not deserve it and that I contributed very little to success. But then I reflected back on the whole event and there was so much fun! Drones flying at 60mph, people talking about their hobbies, everyone comparing their smart watch reading the next morning, trying to quantize hangover. It was a three day event where I spent around 10 hours hacking away at a computer during the first day, some 5 hours during the second day and merely an hour during the last day.
I've never won 1st, but I've won a ton of sponsor prizes at hackathons.
My strategy:
0. Try to recruit a diverse team, you really only need 1, max 2 engineers. If it's an industry hackathon, try to get an industry expert/insider.
1. Try to identify competitions that less people will compete for. For example, everyone does the fun crypto/AI/ML competitions. Without knowing anything about the space, I'm 2 for 2 at supply chain industry focused competitions.
2. Focus on the business solution and your presentation before the code.
3. Focus on frontend/visual code and sponsor APIs before backend code, the backend can almost always be hardcoded.
4. Save time to do a good writeup, readme, take pictures and videos, etc. Explain what you built clearly using multiple forms of media.
My main question: how to choose a project for a hackathon? Should I go big, pie-in-the-sky, or should I bang out a couple small do-able things that I've been thinking of for a while?
I spend some time upfront determining this based on the topic, judges, and my team. If you have a non-technical team, or it's a future tech hackathon (crypto, etc) you need to go for the big pie-in-the-sky ideas. If it's an industry competition (e.g., video compression APIs or something), you want to keep it small and technical.
Damn it. How does one "find" such hackathons that are pure non commercial organic and social spaces? I haven't done one of these (hack weekends) in 15 years!
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadIt has never been too appealing to me to work for a couple of days under time crunch, which is what I always thought hackathons were. The author has done over 30 of them though, so there must be something else that draws people in.
Events are more just workshops / hanging out, with projects being more of a secondary thing.
Turns out you code better when well rested.
very nicely said.
total
I’ve never participated in a hackathon with a 1st prize worth over $500, and I’m not sure I’d want to. But I guess if I had a bunch of random unmonetized projects sitting around then entering them into high-prize-value hackathons could be a way to shop them around. I’m just not sure why an organization would call an event like that a “hackathon.”
Last time I did one I ended up not really attaching myself to a team at all because I had some family issues come up early in the weekend that needed sorting out, and I think that ended up being the most fun I've had at a hackathon - I spent the entire weekend just chatting to people, and occasionally helping out teams with issues they were having where I had some experience. It turned into a mentorthon, which is honestly much more satisfying.
There were a ton of benefits to me personally.
I got to see a ton of different working styles and tech stacks. I got exposed to a lot of the more “playful” side of the technologist’s Internet. I got to see what it took to rapidly stand up a winning “demo,” while it being completely obvious to us (the winners) that we didn’t have the best idea OR best implementation of an idea.
Most of all, though, it was really fun to meet technologists from all walks of life and party with them, drinking too much alcohol and caffeine in a high-pressure environment. It made for a great way to bond with a bunch of people when I was otherwise just a disconnected hobbyist.
I think the tone of the hackathon is really important. I’ve only ever done non-profit based hackathons: art, civics, etc. where the central task is on the order of “what cool or fun thing can we do to make the world more beautiful, more fun, or just better?”
Also, it’s an excuse for people to try out ideas and stacks that they weren’t otherwise willing to give themselves time to explore.
At my previous employer, we did 2 hackathons a year. They were structured so that you could go hard on something you cared a lot about if you wanted to, or you could walk around checking out the (often pretty novel and cool) projects that the teams were working on. There was free food, karaoke, one time there was a cover band playing dance music. If you didn’t want to do a hackathon project, you could take a course on Lynda or Pluralsight, or just goof off and hang out. However, it was a sort of “enforced holiday” where normal day-to-day work was halted.
Sometimes people would work on an incremental quality-of-life improvement to the product that normally wouldn’t be prioritized, with the goal of actually getting them into the product. I’d usually start teams doing really ambitious projects with lots of whiz-bang stuff with the goal of getting the product folks to think bigger about where our product could go. It was a lot of fun, and I think more companies should run hackathons this way.
Also, for some people working for a couple of days under time crunch is the best way to spark their creative output (which may or may not be a sign of possible ADHD, by the way ;])
So yeah, what is winning, it only really ment we had the most charismatic presentation
Oh! The problems charisma can solve. THAT is a book right there.
In the early days of college hackathons (2011-2013), they were very much TechCrunch disrupt style. You were there to build something and win. Staff was incredibly unhelpful. It was the farthest thing from a learning experience I can remember.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Notes:
- This was one of many I snuck into after I had dropped out of college
- It was a mobile app that let you scan an ISBN and would pirate the book for you. The results were sourced from your usual trackers, so 1% of the time it would work and 99% of the time you'd get <NSFW>.
Here's my quick list for how to win a hackathon:
1. Pick team mates who are rock stars (I had at least one "10X" programmer on each of my winning hackathon teams). This is probably the most important point. Nothing is more important than who you choose as a team mate.
2. Pick a project that is easy to explain that also captures peoples imagination. The more people that your idea resonates with, the better.
3. Make use of frameworks and toolkits. Now is NOT the time to learn a new language (if you want to win). The faster you can stand up a functioning prototype, the better.
4. Put together an awesome demo. I've literally seen someone win a hackathon with an amazing presentation and zero working code before. Don't underestimate the importance of the presentation!
I like your idea of a hackathon. Might just arrange something like this post-Covid.
Also the whole C-suite takes part in the judging so it really is an opportunity to show off your work.
Your kind sounds like the original spirit of the hackathon, just a bunch of people making things together.
Winning a Hackathon is more about impressing the audience than technical prowess. I've seen more Hackathons won with a presentation than I ever have with code.
My team was comprised of CS undergrads and we made something that was technically interesting but not at all marketable. This was fine with us, as we were there to have fun. To us, that was "winning".
However, another team was clearly there to win. Their "leader" was a CS grad student, and they were developing an iOS app that would show you a random weighted complete graph. The task for the human was to build a hamiltonian cycle with minimum edge weight sum, i.e. they had to solve a TSP. Their app only showed very small graphs (<= 5 nodes IIRC) with significant edge weight disparities, such that it was usually trivial to find the correct solution. During their presentation they went on to say that they were using the solved puzzles as input for an AI that could then be used to solve larger TSPs. This was very interesting and valuable they said, as the TSP is relevant for delivery companies, logistics etc.
That grad student must have known that it was pure nonsense, but they actually won. There were people from pretty reputable tech companies in the jury, yet they won.
My teammates and I weren't mad though; to us, and some CS students from other teams who clearly knew what was going on, it was pretty funny.
The problem was that the technology was all fiction.
Of course details depend on the judging rules of the particular contest - you "market" your project differently when there's a panel of jurors and differently if it's the contesters that vote on each other's projects. In contests with panels of jurors you can often predict which project each jury member will likely vote on based solely on their professional background.
I've been to countless game jams and my first win (after a long while) was with a simple one-gimmick game that barely managed to not crash during the presentation. If you're there to have fun with technical stuff, you have small (but non-zero) chance of winning, because perfecting your presentation is rarely what people who go to hackathons for fun consider fun ;)
TBH, the best jams often have no voting and no prizes at all :)
Honestly, that'd be a fun hackathon in of itself. You'd declare this the stated goal, and at the end of the hackathon there'd be big, dramatic presentations. You'd bring in a half dozen judges who would not be informed of the hackathon's purpose who would judge the projects in earnest, and you could have a couple more judges who'd be judging primarily on the audacity of the fiction.
Part of the problem is, the entire idea of making the “next big thing”, which will make millions of dollars, in just 48 hours is ridiculous. Even just coming up with the idea is kind of a stretch, but making any sort of prototype and presentation which would seek this idea is very, very rare.
I like the concept of a “game jam” better, because then you’re just making games. Or something like that, where the entire goal is to make a toy project. But then it’s harder to get approval and/or funding, I guess.
My strategy:
0. Try to recruit a diverse team, you really only need 1, max 2 engineers. If it's an industry hackathon, try to get an industry expert/insider.
1. Try to identify competitions that less people will compete for. For example, everyone does the fun crypto/AI/ML competitions. Without knowing anything about the space, I'm 2 for 2 at supply chain industry focused competitions.
2. Focus on the business solution and your presentation before the code.
3. Focus on frontend/visual code and sponsor APIs before backend code, the backend can almost always be hardcoded.
4. Save time to do a good writeup, readme, take pictures and videos, etc. Explain what you built clearly using multiple forms of media.
Judges looking to enhance the most valuable grouping of their social circle will select them.
Triply so if you have VCs judging. They need money more than ideas.