Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.
I won a hackathon once with PowerPoint mock-ups (read: a slide deck). The term “hackathon” means nothing anymore. They’re just pitch competitions anymore.
My organization's most recent hack day was won by the UX team signing up for a free demo of a chat bot service and demoing it - not a single line of code. We haven't had one since, nor do we use chat bots anywhere in our org a few years later.
Hackathons are not about tech, they are about business value now. They are a chance for individual contributors or low level managers to present business ideas to their bosses. Bosses don’t really care about tech.
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.
+1 had a fun Node Knockout experience many years ago making a game with 3 friends. We had a game artist / sound designer, and two engineers with chops on the front-end and back-end.
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.
Yeah this is for "startup lite" hackathons where the goal is to sell an idea and possibly your team to investors. I had a blast doing hackathons where the goal was just to make the coolest thing possible in 24 (or whatever) hours.
I did one in 2013 where a PhD student researching CFD wrote a full fluid simulation in pure javascript and used it for a music visualizer. It was incredible.
Yep, "hackathon" got co-opted into "free labor" the moment business types sniffed it out. Hackers caught on, left, and now "hackathon" means "business types hyping each other over demo sketches" -- which is fine, but not my cup of tea, and about as far as it is possible to be from the original spirit of hacking.
I had this exact experience. We had a successful hackathon led by the engineering team where we just built cool things that somewhat aligned with the business.
The "Innovation" team decided we were pushing into their turf and took it over. Then it was decided that requiring actual development wasn't inclusive enough. The next "hackathon" was just a parade of PowerPoint presentations.
In this situation, did you have to sign away rights to participate? If you don't sign anything I'd imagine you retain rights to whatever you build, no?
This happened at a place I worked. There was an internal hackathon where people built things. It was well received and expanded to all employees. The problem was, developers were about 10% of the population there. It became an idea-a-thon, which chased the developers away even more.
Though I know what you mean, I also kind of saw it as a rite of passage. At some point in your career some guy selling merch under his jacket will come to you with a "great idea" where you will do all the work and he'll be the "idea guy".
It does suck though that hackathons may have devolved into being just that. I haven't been to a hackathon since 2015 and if they've become either dominated by idea-guys or about only making nice looking frontends then that's kind of sad.
EDIT: Oh, I guess I forgot a hackathon I went to in 2017, if you could even call it that. I arrived thinking that we'd be, you know, making actual apps. It turned out I may have been the only person in the entire venue doing actual work. Everyone on my team dicked around the whole time. We were one of 2 teams that actually had something that worked. All the other teams had fake as f*k "prototypes" in programs like Figma and no actually working code. The other team that had working code was just making a Twilio API call. The winner and all the others got attention because their apps looked good. My app might have been ugly but it successfully implemented nonstandard behavior (something you can't just rip off Stack Overflow) and even had authentication.
Now I remember why I haven't been back to a hackathon since.
When it comes down to a 4 minute demo the engineering is irrelevant. Instead spend the time to pick the right words and tell a story with pretty pictures.
Missing the point of what was making people want to participate in old-school hackathons and what made these events fun in the first place. It is true that these days most hackathons are reduced to a pitching contest you describe, and that's exactly what's wrong with them (along some other things).
Not that there isn't a place for pitching contests or people who still find them fun, but GP was talking about how the term "hackathon" was taken over and doesn't mean what it used to anymore.
The few I went to 10ish years ago had something of a party atmosphere. Free beer and pizza, and the winner was the one with funniest presentation.
Imagine my surprise when they started showing up on new graduates' resumes, eventually I learned that they were more like all night working sessions now.
This is why I participated in only two hackathons, but several dozens of game jams in my life - the "hacking party atmosphere" survived much longer and can (well, could before the pandemic) still be found there. All you had to do is to avoid those jams with official jury panels and non-symbolic prizes, although at times even the presence of jury and prizes wasn't enough to ruin it.
"The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room."
The main goal is to have fun and build something that brings you joy.
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.
If anyone's looking to participate in a large (on the order of 100 participants or more) hackathon in the near future, this advice is 100% on the money. No matter how demonstrably useful your product is, something with better UX will win 9 times out of 10, even if the idea behind the good UX is inherently flawed and the application isn't even functional beyond the wireframe level (no one will fuzz test it).
I came away from this thinking hackathons were a complete and total waste of time, but at the same time while I've not once won a prize at a hackathon despite participating in several, I have my current job because of connections I gained during one.
Point taken, but jeez, Hackathons are supposed to be participatory/inclusive events. Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks. Full disclosure I am running a hackathon at my company this very week and am nervous about participation and this post made me anxious lol.
Seems like the author needs to attend Hackathons where the sole purpose isn't to sell a SaaS prototype to investors and clients. I have been to enough of them where no one cares how fancy the CSS styling on the page looks. Or even that there's a GUI at all. One time the winner wrote a CLI script. I routinely demo API calls using Postman.
Yeah, I've co-organized and attended multiple hackathons, and one of our organization principles is "code is key", to combat powerpoint-only submissions.
That means that there is a code-screening after the submission deadline that ensures that what was demoed was also implemented, and also gives some points in the overall scoring based on execution. We have seen submissions that include a fully-fleged backend including tests, as well as completely faked demos (which were easy to pick up, as what they promised was too far removed from reality).
This is often true in professional settings. "Just build the UI for this, and the API team will catch up". I object-- give me an OpenAPI spec that we agree upon in advance. Front-end today involves building up a lot of in-memory data structures, and I haven't built something useful if the JSON shape I attempt giving you, is not what the backend team is expecting.
This is true, and part of a larger problem where product managers and BAs come in and try to REUSE components conceived in a hackathon. I hope I never have to see that again.
At least for “day job” hackathons this seems counterproductive. A big part of winning support to productionize is proving to the naysayers that an implementation is feasible.
For example, at my current job folks are biased to complex, high-risk AI/ML approaches… Instead of figuring out an imperative solution, senior folks tend to just discard it.
A hackathon is a great way to short-circuit artificial technical road blocks and win support from product and business teams to start with a simple solution.
There is a professional form of hackathons, often found in procurement opportunities. Participating teams/companies are evaluated via a technical challenge. While not the best way to evaluate for $X-XXXM efforts, they certainly provide opportunity to showcase.
Ive had multiple successes here.
Platform/infra and backend are the most critical parts to get right, and come automated with.
I can staff any team of junior devs enabled by tools like react to quickly implement user interfaces beyond what competitors showcase; but only due to the backbone.
This exact thing happened to me. I was the backend guy on a winning hackathon team and decided it was pointless to build a real server for the proposed idea. It was essentially a single page app, v nicely designed etc, kind of a half-baked concept but kind of fine. Definitely aligned with the business. It won with the entire backend being mocked. It didn't really matter if there there was actual business logic underneath. I just advised on API design and made sure the idea hung together technically speaking.
It beat some much cooler, technically innovative concepts. It made me not want to participate in another hackathon though. All the fun, nerdiness and actual hacking were replaced by basically building a sensible product demo.
OP is the kind of person that messages his highschool friends on Facebook talking about how he has an app he designed that he just needs a developer for and it's "like 90% done", but when you ask him for his part of the work he sends you a PSD with the UI design.
> The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room.
The term hackathon nowadays is almost never related to software development. You can win most "hackathons" with a powerpoint slide, doing actual programming won't win you a price.
Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, the important thing is to recognize when a "hackathon" is actually a "pitchathon" (usually) and to not waste effort doing things that will go unappreciated at a pitchathon (namely, hacking).
Or more specifically, the only winning move is to exploit these pitchathons to meet people with complementary skills ("backend dev? meet UI engineer") and then collectively run the hell away from the event with your expanded network.
Then go do a real hackathon with interested parties, and not business pitches.
It has infact come to this. A lot of people whom I met at hackathons don't participate anymore and it took me a while to realise that this was because hackathons aren't what they used to be.
That's a little depressing. The hackathons around here are just people getting together to work on what ever they feel like. There's no jury, no contest, just hacking on fun little projects, helping others.
The observation might be correct in the circle where to author travels, but it does remind me of the dotcom days. You always had this guy: The Idea Guy. He couldn't actually do anything. He just had "ideas", and others just had to write code to make it work. The important part is that the ideas where the thing that matters, coding was something anyone could do... except the idea guy, apparently (much too busy I guess). The plan was always the same thing, the idea guy would come up with business ideas, and a team would code them up, while the idea guy sat in his office, dreaming up the next big product.
Back then those people where basically a joke, but now I guess they're important.
Ugh, not to get on a grumpy-old-man tangent, but I recall when 'hacking' and 'hackathon' had fairly specific and nerdy meanings, and not 'let's try to knock something up we could do in Figma or another wireframe tool to sell to investors'
I guess it depends on the type of hackathon and project. Not to long ago I participated in a hackathon in which we make a super simple video game. Even though the majority of the work was making the game, the 2 hours used in making the scrappiest ever node.js/express server for arcade-style high scores was the most popular feature by far.
So, in that case, being a scrappy backend proved to be very valuable.
Like 3 hours some people realized that they could just POST whatever to the server and the high scores where pointless, but nonetheless, that small backend (20 lines?) proved a very important point
The next logical extension of this is: "Front End Developers on Hackathons Are Not needed."
After that, it's "UI/UX Prototype Designers on Hackathons Are Not Needed."
If you want to turn your Hackathon into a Pitchathon, then okay, yes, you don't need any developers or designers of any type, you just need someone with an idea who can communicate that idea. But, that's not really the same thing, is it?
99 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadIt was the Alexa prompt driven chatbot. Not a single line of code was written.
Building a clickable demo that fakes is literally 1000 times better. When the feedback comes in you can change it almost in real time.
Once everyone is happy with how the UX and all that work then someone can build the actual requirements.
Which will look nothing like the original idea.
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.
In which the Judges have to actually try out the submission instead of listening to people go through a slide deck on a video.
I did one in 2013 where a PhD student researching CFD wrote a full fluid simulation in pure javascript and used it for a music visualizer. It was incredible.
EDIT: I actually found the demo I was thinking of! Still holds up: https://vimeo.com/79272443
The "Innovation" team decided we were pushing into their turf and took it over. Then it was decided that requiring actual development wasn't inclusive enough. The next "hackathon" was just a parade of PowerPoint presentations.
In this situation, did you have to sign away rights to participate? If you don't sign anything I'd imagine you retain rights to whatever you build, no?
It does suck though that hackathons may have devolved into being just that. I haven't been to a hackathon since 2015 and if they've become either dominated by idea-guys or about only making nice looking frontends then that's kind of sad.
EDIT: Oh, I guess I forgot a hackathon I went to in 2017, if you could even call it that. I arrived thinking that we'd be, you know, making actual apps. It turned out I may have been the only person in the entire venue doing actual work. Everyone on my team dicked around the whole time. We were one of 2 teams that actually had something that worked. All the other teams had fake as f*k "prototypes" in programs like Figma and no actually working code. The other team that had working code was just making a Twilio API call. The winner and all the others got attention because their apps looked good. My app might have been ugly but it successfully implemented nonstandard behavior (something you can't just rip off Stack Overflow) and even had authentication.
Now I remember why I haven't been back to a hackathon since.
Not that there isn't a place for pitching contests or people who still find them fun, but GP was talking about how the term "hackathon" was taken over and doesn't mean what it used to anymore.
BTW, I agree that marketing driven 4 minute hackathon demos are stupid.
That's what I said. I'm not so sure on who's injecting a straw man here :)
Imagine my surprise when they started showing up on new graduates' resumes, eventually I learned that they were more like all night working sessions now.
The main goal is to have fun and build something that brings you joy.
I came away from this thinking hackathons were a complete and total waste of time, but at the same time while I've not once won a prize at a hackathon despite participating in several, I have my current job because of connections I gained during one.
I agree, but business goals supersede our feelings.
Seems like the author needs to attend Hackathons where the sole purpose isn't to sell a SaaS prototype to investors and clients. I have been to enough of them where no one cares how fancy the CSS styling on the page looks. Or even that there's a GUI at all. One time the winner wrote a CLI script. I routinely demo API calls using Postman.
That means that there is a code-screening after the submission deadline that ensures that what was demoed was also implemented, and also gives some points in the overall scoring based on execution. We have seen submissions that include a fully-fleged backend including tests, as well as completely faked demos (which were easy to pick up, as what they promised was too far removed from reality).
It's a good thing those horrible old days of "ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the execution that matters" are long, long gone.
For example, at my current job folks are biased to complex, high-risk AI/ML approaches… Instead of figuring out an imperative solution, senior folks tend to just discard it.
A hackathon is a great way to short-circuit artificial technical road blocks and win support from product and business teams to start with a simple solution.
Ive had multiple successes here.
Platform/infra and backend are the most critical parts to get right, and come automated with.
I can staff any team of junior devs enabled by tools like react to quickly implement user interfaces beyond what competitors showcase; but only due to the backbone.
Is this a "hackathon" or just a "pitchathon"?
I'm ok with the idea of a "pitchathon" but don't call it a Hackathon...
It beat some much cooler, technically innovative concepts. It made me not want to participate in another hackathon though. All the fun, nerdiness and actual hacking were replaced by basically building a sensible product demo.
The post is talking about the fact that hackathons are no longer judged by their technical merits.
that the OP doesn't understand the value of backend developers in real world is not something that I can see from the post.
No, that's a Startup Weekend-type event: https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend. They rightfully don't call themselves hackathons.
A hackathon should be related to software development, not entrepreneurship.
Nothing wrong with either, but labels matter.
Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, the important thing is to recognize when a "hackathon" is actually a "pitchathon" (usually) and to not waste effort doing things that will go unappreciated at a pitchathon (namely, hacking).
The only winning move is not to play.
Or more specifically, the only winning move is to exploit these pitchathons to meet people with complementary skills ("backend dev? meet UI engineer") and then collectively run the hell away from the event with your expanded network.
Then go do a real hackathon with interested parties, and not business pitches.
It has infact come to this. A lot of people whom I met at hackathons don't participate anymore and it took me a while to realise that this was because hackathons aren't what they used to be.
The observation might be correct in the circle where to author travels, but it does remind me of the dotcom days. You always had this guy: The Idea Guy. He couldn't actually do anything. He just had "ideas", and others just had to write code to make it work. The important part is that the ideas where the thing that matters, coding was something anyone could do... except the idea guy, apparently (much too busy I guess). The plan was always the same thing, the idea guy would come up with business ideas, and a team would code them up, while the idea guy sat in his office, dreaming up the next big product.
Back then those people where basically a joke, but now I guess they're important.
The author’s idea of a hackathon is Shark Tank. There’s more to hackathons (execution) than the idea and visual at the end.
So, in that case, being a scrappy backend proved to be very valuable.
Like 3 hours some people realized that they could just POST whatever to the server and the high scores where pointless, but nonetheless, that small backend (20 lines?) proved a very important point
After that, it's "UI/UX Prototype Designers on Hackathons Are Not Needed."
If you want to turn your Hackathon into a Pitchathon, then okay, yes, you don't need any developers or designers of any type, you just need someone with an idea who can communicate that idea. But, that's not really the same thing, is it?