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Comment by ivolimmen | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

Reminds me of when my friends and I used to have LAN parties in the 90s. Good times.

I like your idea of a hackathon. Might just arrange something like this post-Covid.

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.

This is a serious question: how is this not just a masked way to get people to work weekends? Is it voluntary?

It doesn't sound like his are company-related.

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.

I love this so much. Thanks for the inspiration - going to organize something like this for my Uni in the fall!

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