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Hackathon No More

chengsoon.com

85 pointscheeaun31 comments

If you use that much Red Bull, you got 2 issues (at least): the sugar gives a rush, but the bloodsugar level will plunge. And each time you continue it plunges even harder and faster.

Second, Red Bull or any caffinated beverage will attack your adrenal gland badly. Realy hard. Your adrenal gland is responsible for your adrenaline (duh) and gets triggered by the caffeine. So, it's not the caffeine that gives you a boost, but the adrenaline that gets released. Until it's gone, drought up, vanished. You can drink Red Bull till you die, but the adrenaline won't be there. Until you fix it.

You see, your body is a bank. A bank full of nutrient to be released when some other part of the body needs it. If you never make deposits, you won't get any interest either. If you only make withdrawals, you will end up with debit. If you continue you go bankrupt and die.

Healthy hackathons? I guess it's possible. I eat a lot of butter from grass-fed cows. I use omega-3 a lot and magnesium. My brains work much better and that without any caffeine. There are other supplements one can use, but always with moderation and enough sleep. Without sleep, your hormones won't get any rest or balance.

Hackers who think they have super powers and don't need sleep are having a Wall-Street mentality prior to 2008. Grow up, you only have one body, so you better take care of it.

There's always sugar-free Red Bull which is preferable to the sugary default kind, but I like high-quality green tea. After you wean yourself off the hard caffeine spikes of coffee or Red Bull, you realise green tea contains trace amounts of caffeine, enough to get you over the hump after your body readjusts. It's also antioxidant-rich.

I agree with the sugar-free, but often they replace it with something worse.

Actually anything natural, organic food is stimulating the body, while anything artificial, fabricated food is destroying the body.

So if you want to hack along with a sharp mind, keep your mind in shape by replenishing the body with what it needs. Period.

Seems like quite an over-generalization. I agree that a rational Bayesian approach would favor organic foods, because thousands of years of natural selection is probably a better indicator than laboratory tests of long-term low-dose toxicities and important but uncommon complex molecules in food supplies. But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of natural substances that are damaging to the human body even in moderation.

Absolutely! A well rested body and mind will perform much better than one forced to the limits. Proper rest and nutrition will give you the ability to win the marathon. These hackathons are sprints which can be good to get going fast, and if approached with the right mindset, can provide inspiration but rarely will produce anyone's best work.

Hackathons have their place. They are a good place to meet people and test new ideas. If you're expecting anything more, like I suspect the author does/did, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

I use caffeine actually primarily to control my ADD. The effect is harder to put my finger on, longer lasting, and more necessary for my work. If I am without caffeine for a couple fo days, my productivity drops modestly but that's ok. If I continue for a few weeks however at some point I may have trouble doing anything. I might spend all my time on HN at that point.

I do agree about energy drinks though. Tea works for me. I drink coffee in a pinch. Mix those with sugar and I can say goodbye to doing anything worthwhile though....

Caffeine directly stimulates the central nervous system.

You could set up a test where you drank a pot of coffee and then did something insane, I assure you that you will still feel the effects of the adrenaline kick from the insanity.

>Make the stretch longer. Let's say, three days, from Friday evening to Sunday night, so there would still be time if the participants slept through the night.

Like a hacker test match. What a pleasing image.

There should be tea breaks.

I've thrown some hackathons at work and this is the model we always use. Friday after work + dinner we brainstorm and figure out what to do and then we might prototype a bit. Saturday we meet again refreshed and hack, we dont stay up to late and might even go for beers. Then we meet for another 4-5 hours on sunday to make a wrap of it.

Personally I can enjoy both the 24-hour/whatever-hour stretch and the weekend-with-rest style, but I find the first one to require working with someone with whom we feed energy to each other so we can maintain progress — I've just met one such person in my life and he doesn't live in the same country as me anymore. So in the end I prefer the weekend style hackathon now as well.

You've just described Rails Camp.

I'm off to the next Rails Camp Australia in a couple of weeks: Friday afternoon to Monday morning in the beautiful Gold Coast hinterland. Anything goes - hacking, coffee, beer, exercise, partying or sleeping, and even camping.

Although rails camp isn't structured in a way to encourage people to complete projects. The opportunity is there, but it is also an opportunity to chill out with friends or get blind drunk of you are that way inclined, so different feel to a hackathon where everyone is feverishly working away on something.

This doesn't stop lots of people getting some really cool stuff done. Everyone who has completed something cool presents on the Sunday evening and it's awesome.

Generally it's a really well balanced mix of hacking, gaming, socialising and optionally drinking.

overall, we did a lot of what you suggested at PennApps. I think the key is to provide an avenue for both types of hackers: if you want to stay up all night, we have Red Bull and late-night give-aways. If you want to sleep, we have a quiet area with portable hammocks or sleeping bags. Healthy food is available throughout and organized exercise is available to those who seek it out.

By the way, if you (hackathon organizer) have the budget for it, bringing in masseuses (15 minutes per person, sign up/raffle spots off) is an amazing Saturday break. Sponsored by pick-your-favorite-VC.

> I really felt like going home and have a good night sleep. But I didn't want to let your fellow hackers down

This is the tricky bit, because it's where our social instincts give the wrong answer, and it's important to be able to recognize it because it happens in other contexts than hackathons.

In reality, if your teammates want to stay at work all night, you are letting them down by joining them, because you are reinforcing their irrational and self-destructive behavior as well as damaging your own ability to contribute. The best thing you can do for them is go home and rest so you can work productively tomorrow, tell them to do the same thing, and hope the message will eventually get through.

Why would anyone think they can write good code without sleep? I need my sleep to function and will not go to any contest or event where sleeping at night is not an option.

I always leave for home at about 9 during hackathons, and am back at around 7 or 8 the next day. There's certainly a clarity of thought I gain.

Your doing it wrong. Get a night's rest and get back to it in the morning and you'll code better than everyone else who stayed up all night.

This is what I do. Get some rest, and come back.

Game jam Melbourne pretty much does this. Friday to Sunday, facilities to sleep and shower. Food and drink (with healthy choices) available. Those that were most productive probably were those that went to bed at a reasonable time the first night.

I never try to kill my self at Hackathons. Go to sleep when you are tired and dont eat crap. At some point you are bound to get only diminishing returns, you should know this by now if you are all grown up.

This is how we do things at ZocDoc actually (http://engineering.zocdoc.com/post/19991240421/winter-hackat...) and it really is great. We start thursday evening and finish on sunday, there are definitely late nights but plenty of sleep. The timespan is more than reasonable to finish a project. Definitely the best way to do a hackathon.

That's why over at Berkeley we at Hackers at Berkeley decided to start hosting Hackjams. They're twelve hour events from about 1 PM to 1 AM. We have much less pressure, more emphasis on fun and trying things out and showing what you learned, even if you don't have anything approaching a product (I once showed an awful demonstration of all that I had managed to learn about Three.JS in five hours).

I absolutely agree with the article. Most people don't realize that their productivity will become shitty if you introduce little sleep, bad food and no exercise - so why would you artificially work with exactly these things to finish your product?

48 or 72 hours total time spent developing an application should be ample time to have something bootstrapped. I don't mean 3 days, I mean total time working on a project.

I've found that if I go over the 72 hour mark, I begin to lose interest

Lean Startup Machine takes the three-day approach and it works extremely well.

Whenever we (http://brighterplanet.com) sponsor hackathons we always do a "Healthy Hacker" component, with yoga, healthy food, etc. e.g.:

http://numbers.brighterplanet.com/2011/04/12/healthy-hacker-... http://numbers.brighterplanet.com/2012/01/27/cleanweb-hackat...

Do multi-day marathons for runners, swimmers, and other sports athletes go continuously 24-hour or do they have a way to fairly sleep each night? If so, is there anything to be learned by how traditional sports handle this issue?

I read somewhere that some races take a time snapshot of when the athletes arrive at a sleeping stop and use it to determine when they can resume the next day.

I would recommend taking a look at http://hackdaymanifesto.com

Also as someone who has runs about one community event be it hackday, designjam or barcamp a month I have learned to cater for everyone as best as possible.

I agree, especially on the food & drinks and on physical exercise.

That's why hackerspaces are better imho. You don't have to rush an idea to be finished in a weekend.

If you increase the length of a hackathon (from 1 day to 2, or 2 to 3) then you'll just increase the expected output, people likely won't take it easier.

This isn't rocket science, put explosive fuel in your body and you sprint for about 6 hours, and then you crash and need 5 days to recover. Ignore the warnings and drink these poisons/fuels several times a day and you'll burn yourself out after 3 to 10 months and decide that botany isn't as bad a career path as everyone says. Burn out is your body telling you that the red bulls are killing you.

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