Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

*For one very narrow definition of Hackathon

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.

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.

We've restarted doing 2-day hackathons at my work, and in the spirit of being as inclusive as possible for all team members, we don't require teams to submit code at the end.

Some still do though, but in the end we want teams to play to their individual strengths and deliver anything they want that fits the theme.

We do pick themes that are relevant to the business, but there are no other requirements, and we do it over 2 days during working hours (and even provide Doordash and Starbucks cards to the teams for meals and coffee), so there's no "free labour" shenanigans or weekend work.

So far it has been a great success, and I believe we've had much higher participation than if we had stuck to the more traditional definition of a hackathon.

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?

This is true

but this is a disgrace to the whole idea of a hackathon and goes against the very spirit.

Business suit people should stop appropriating words from the tech space: what passes for a hackathon submission these days is a PowerPoint presentation with realistic click points. It's still a "deck" which is what they've always been doing

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.

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.

>If you were able to show the idea, it looks sexy and everybody is nodding — you won.

Is this a "hackathon" or just a "pitchathon"?

I'm ok with the idea of a "pitchathon" but don't call it a Hackathon...

Hackathons are literally the opposite. You are there to deliver something that works, looking pretty is 30 yards down the line of concerns,

The last so-called hackathon I went to involved a bunch of idea guys sitting in a room talking about how cool their ideas were. One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough.

Like I did it for free man, can you at least try to say thank you.

I will say I do enjoy game jams, at least then we have something fun to play. I have no interest in prototyping an app for someone else to get rich.

"Backend developers on hackathons are not needed"

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.

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.

As a backend developer. This is correct. I’ve seen teams waste months building a perfect system that doesn’t do what’s needed.

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.

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.

I’ve personally seen hackathons won by backend-ish things, such as a recommendation engine and a command line tool.

The author’s idea of a hackathon is Shark Tank. There’s more to hackathons (execution) than the idea and visual at the end.

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

Yeah, if you prescribe to the smoke and mirrors style.

Sometimes the logic or capabilities of technology have to be explained at a cursory level just to provide some grounding.

I made the same mistake as OP thinking I could dazzle my "investors". It was the early days of VR before controllers existed and I built a few peripherals to compensate for an interactive training environment (savings of 2MM travel/training etc).

Demo was a hit, numbers were a hit, they started asking about tech, adoption, viability...I believed in VR but they needed to believe it was going to be real based on more than my enthusiasm.

Shelved only to be revived five years later with someone else running it following a trail that had been clearly blazed by competition. I was happy for them but always wished I had been given a chance to take that shot before the wave hit. I just lacked the credentials and I was never clever enough to be a "baffle with bullshit" person.

Backend people even just to say: "I am the authority and everything said here is possible. I will show you if you are seriously interested in the mechanics"

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.

Let's cut out the middleman entirely and say that Hackathons, as such, aren't needed ;)

Seems the concensus is that front end is the most imperative thing out of the gate. Seems true in my non hackathon side project, of which I'm the solo dev.

Can anyone please recommend a good front end framework/tool for a backend dev?

I've been working on a project for awhile and the sequence has been:

1. Get requirements

2. Make excellent back end (and clarify functionality, edge cases along the way)

3. Build non sexy front end that works functionally

4. Get complaints front end is not sexy even though it can do very sexy things through the back end

5. Requirements change massively and now I have to tear down and repeat 1-4 with ever-increasing comments about it not being sexy.

Right now everything is django templates + bootstrap + javascript/jquery. It works but is not sexy.

Actually, you don't need frontend devs as well. Just use UX designer + Figma.

Hackathons are jokes. I was once lured to one for building phone apps. The winning entry was a team with a PowerPoint. The judges were VC. They’re just fishing for ideas to fund. A great waste of time.

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 hackathons after one kid at Hack the North U Waterloo literally tore a muscle in his eye from looking at a screen too long...

When did hackathons become about "winning"? I thought it was a chance to test out new solutions that your day-to-day job wouldn't necessarily give you the opportunity to explore.

this assumes a lot about what type of hackathon you're going to and why you're going to a hackathon. If you're going to a hackathon that's a judged competition with prizes for the specific purposes of trying to win a prize, this is accurate, but what you're really doing when you attend hackathons like that with those goals is working for the hackathon organizer without a contract, hoping that you'll get paid, knowing that most of you won't. That's not play, that's work. Is that worth it? Maybe. If it's your only opportunity to potentially get paid or you would have nothing to do otherwise or you're really motivated by competition (and not learning/fun/socialization), sure, that can be worth it.

If you're going to a hackathon with the intention of learning/fun/socialization this post is terrible advice. I went to hackathons for years. I never went with the intention of winning. I always enjoyed myself and always got what I wanted out of it. I've never placed first in a hackathon, but I met several friends at hackathons that I am still friends with years later, learned many technologies through attending hackathons, built lots of fun little projects that I'm proud of, and met my wife at a hackathon.

And to all those people saying "that's not really a hackathon", that ship sailed long ago.

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.

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.

Just skip everyone except an invision prototyper and a LOB. Done ! Reductive and missing the point of Hackathons, and simply a poor shark tank style pitch-a-thon.

Sounds like these are not Hackathons but MVP-athons.

Depends on your idea. For example, if you're actually building a demo that requires collaborative features that others can try in real-time, backend can add a lot to the working and cool factor. Imagine you're making a skribbl.io clone, you can't just fake other user's live inputs.

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 participiated once in a corporate sponsored hackathon and won with a slide show. Those hackathons have nowadays nothing to do with software development and i will never again participate in that. They are almost always about adding business value and some startup crap.

Title should be: Backend Developers Are Not Needed... to win most 'Hackathons'

I can agree with this, as much as I dislike the trend as the 'hack'ing isn't on the system being prototyped, but rather the system of judging the event.

I don't see the point of starting an app without reactive OAUTH2, SQL, and HTTP support ready to use. It strains me to understand what tools people bring to hackathons in a usable form.

Why would you want to go to that kind of event anyway?

I've been to lord knows how many events fitting this description and I can remember exactly zero products or startups coming out of this.

Of course not, assuming the goal is demo UX via UI behavior, it's far more expedient to mock backend dependencies on the front end. Is this supposed to be controversial?

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.

I guess I don't disagree, but not sure I understand the point if all you need is one guy with a copy of illustrator/photoshop/whatever?

Your hackathon results should not "look sexy". If that's what you're focusing on, you're going to the wrong hackathons.

I've won hackathons building real time multiplayer games. In those cases it was the backend that set it apart from the competition.

Back end developers are not needed in general.

(Ducks from all the rotten vegetables being thrown at me)

It was a joke, everyone!

(I am a front end developer and I like teasing back end folks)