How to attend a hackathon | Hacker News Reader

How to attend a hackathon

dickey.xxx

He lost me when he started talking about Startup Weekend. Some people may find that kind of thing fun, but sorry that's not a hackathon.

I went to one a few weeks ago, and bailed when I realized business school students and hustlers out-numbered engineers 4 to 1. Entire teams of 7-8 people formed that didn't have a single technical person on them. I checked back with a friend afterwards, and apparently none of the top winning teams actually built anything -- they just presented business plans. Unless you want to work on a business plan for 48 hours, stay away...

Depends on the city and the makeup of the attendees but in NYC (where I organize them) we usually have an even split between devs and business (slightly fewer designers as well).

I had the exact same experience. I basically had to join up with 4 B-School students and work my ass off on their ideas which weren't interesting (and I couldn't play with anything technologically interesting since I didn't really have the time). By the end of saturday I realized I was burning myself out on something that I had no interest in and told them I quit (for fear of burning myself out for my actual job). It turns out they didn't even really need me because as you said, everyone presented business ideas with at most landing pages developed.

I think SW might be more successful if the process isn't so ad-hoc on the first night.. maybe a web site that goes up the week before that lets people decide what they want to work on and start some initial planning. I'd also like to be sure I'm matched up with developers that I'd like to work with because the main reason I went there was to learn from other developers; Instead I was the only one on the team and felt like an unpaid laborer. Also, developers and designers should be better incentivized to attend by e.g. having much lower entrance fees than biz dev folks, and perhaps also by having separate prizes for best code/design.

I've attended a flock of Startup Weekends - Austin, DC, Houston - and was one of the organizers of the last one here in Austin.

The mix of attendees & skill sets is both the hardest and most important thing. The approach we took was multi-faceted:

- we announced it quietly to the tech groups first - mobile dev, rails, php, python, etc - with an embargo on tweeting it;

- once we started spreading the word further, we made a very small number of non-technical/non-designer tickets available;

- once those were sold out, we put the entire event into waitlist mode.. from then on, to buy a ticket, you had to send us a Linked In profile to prove your background.

And once we opened it back up to business people, we wanted to get the most motivated, so we asked everyone on the list to make a 1 minute video pitch on why they should get a ticket.. and then tweet it to us with the event hashtag. Most didn't bother making a video, so the decision was simple.

The result was a good mix of people and the non-technical people were very motivated and (probably) felt lucky to be there.

My 0.02.

That seems like a good approach. I'm not against spending a weekend working with Biz Dev folks as there is lots I can learn from them, but in my SW (Honolulu) it was mostly inexperienced B-school students and they outnumbered devs at least two to one (and of around 80 people I think there was 3 designers!)

I don't doubt your experience but you've attended one event and are telling people to avoid it despite the fact they organize hundred of events all over the world. Each one has it's own organizers and compositions. They even focus on different topics (edu/gov/general/maybe more?).

I've attended Startup Weekends and been an organizer (so you know my bias). But I've met lots of good developers at these events. Startup Weekend is more friendly towards non-technical people than any other hackathon I've been to. But that's also part of the appeal. It could be detrimental if any group isn't represented well enough or is over represented. But don't let that dissuade people from trying it out. If you're really worried, bring a technical friend, worst case scenario, you get to hack on something with a buddy for a weekend.

You seem a bit disappointed because of the outcome instead of focusing on what you got to do during the weekend. What did you work on? Did you learn anything? Did you make any new friends/connections? Did you get some new ideas that translate to something else you're working on?

Why the hell do they call it a hackathon if it is not a hacker-only event? The only thing that happens at a marathon is running. They should come up with their own description and stop trying to trick hackers into showing up.

I was the one that referred to it as a hackathon, not them. They call it an 'event'.

That's funny. I work at Startup Weekend, and one of the few bullet points in our "Core Values" doc is: "We are not a hackathon."

Hackathons don't happen in my area, but I can assure you, I am not particularly interested in hacking on biz-dev ideas. I'd far prefer to put together a booting OS or a minimal VCS or ... (other technical idea not salable).

Well, anecdotal evidence, but plenty of my friends who have experienced startup weekend summarized it as follows:

"Seeking technical cofounder!"

Please see my comment above. The event was run by the CEO of Startup Weekend, so I don't think I'm misrepresenting the organization.

I've only been to one hackathon (Angelhack NYC), but I've heard that other ones have a similar problem - short demos. If you are evaluating a project in 2 minutes, you aren't evaluating anything except a team's ability to pitch. Granted, pitching is a useful skill, but maybe it should be called a Pitchathon because those of us who code all night get resentful of well-rested biz devs with a slide deck being in a 'hackathon'.

I know judging time tends to get limited, but one easy solution would have been to either split the judges up or use staff/volunteers to have some sort of preliminary round where you get 10-15 minutes to do a full working demo that shows all your work, not just a concept. The second added benefit is then you have a shorter 'final round' where only the best projects get demoed for everyone. The only downside is that not everyone gets to do a 'real demo' in front of the judges but maybe it's a good thing if it needs to be earned. I personally would have felt much better getting knocked out in an early round after actually showing all the work I put in rather than feeling like 90% of my work was irrelevant as far as the demo went because I didn't have time to show it.

Yeah, from what I heard about of the Melbourne startup weekend it made more sense for a team to do so mockups and work on a business plan an pitch than to write my code. In terms of winning at least.

I am a big fan of the global games jam held at 100s of venues across the world in January. Games are great because the results are mainly about the execution on the weekend and unlike building a web app and getting customers there isn't really any ongoing commitment unless you really want to continue with it.

I've been to three startup weekends and they seem to vary greatly depending on who puts them on.

First one I went to was in a college town in Michigan (East Lansing). The organizer was still a student and so were most of the attendees. It was very much a hackathon with a focus on building something in 2 and half days. My team had an iphone, mac, and web app working and we won "crowd favorite" and "coolest"

The second one I did was in Seattle. Lots of developers were there, but the teams that did the best didn't necessarily have the most functional code. Still, everyone had some sort of prototype, many of them quite polished.

The third I did was an internal Microsoft Startup Weekend (although still put on by the folks at Startup Weekend). It was dominated by business type people, although there were a decent amount of developers. The judges essentially ignored the fact that anyone had running code and went solely on people's slide decks.

As a developer, I enjoyed the first one the most by far.

Responding to top comment, but want to address concerns in several of the replies. FWIW, the event was actually organized by the management of Startup Weekend themselves: Marc Nager, the CEO, and Frank Nouyrigat, the CTO. So I don't think I'm misrepresenting the organization in talking about my experience.

It was the recent one at Stanford, you can read about it here: http://stanford.startupweekend.org/

The online application seemed to imply only technical people would be allowed in, which is what led me to think it was a hackathon. It was also restricted to Stanford students and alums. Only later did it become clear that the Stanford business school was one of the co-organizers, and they had secured a large number of the "slots" for their own students.

They did have a bunch of designers there also, which is nice. But the event still felt like it had a 4:1 ratio of "people who can think about a business plan" to "people who can build something".

More importantly, the judges didn't actually care about whether teams had built anything. Most of them didn't have tech backgrounds - they were there as reps from the sponsors. Startup Weekend is pretty open about the business-ey aspect of their events, so it's my fault for not realizing that in advance. On their website it reads "on average, half of Startup Weekend’s attendees have technical or design backgrounds, the other half have business backgrounds."

Still, I think they need to decide what they want to be. If they are going to use judges who could not care less if you actually built something, they need to be open about that up front. Technical people who want to spend a weekend building a product need to know they should stay away. Or, Startup Weekend could require judges to heavily take into account actual product development in their decisions, and try to attract more coders. But as of right now, they are doing the former but still trying to get coders to attend, and for me that was a bad experience.

Not sure about the rest of you, but I'm not clicking on a dickey.xxx link to read about anything.

Its definitely a safe site, though can understand the issue with the url. You should send feedback on the domain to him directly on twitter @dickeyxxx

Don't ever get a domain with .xxx if you aren't going to create what it's meant for. Damn site is blocked at my work place.

He may also intend to host pornographic material! Who knows.

Then don't host hackathons! :D

Actually, sounds like exactly the sort of hackathon I'd like to attend...

Spend $10, put the normal stuff on the normal domain.

it's way more fun this way

No, it's really part of a vast conspiracy.

After the content has been accidentally upvoted to the front page of HN, the OP will then make sure to only serve porn when your IT department goes back to verify whether or not the content was actually SFW.

Interesting, .xxx could be a useful way to filter out corporate types, I'm wondering when that might be useful.

It seems like a pretty broad brush to equate "people with workplace filters" with "corporate types".

For example, I'm a guy with a CS degree who is a high school teacher. Does that make me a "corporate type"?

Maybe a better category name could be SquareNet.

Because all the other TLDs are being used for exactly what they were intended for...

Yeah, I'm not going to an XXX domain at work. The idea is terrible and not worth whatever benefit was in mind.

That's a great point about having a winner not being all it's cracked up to be. Having to show something is enough motivation for me.

Also sponsors often take away as much from hackathons as they put into them. I'd love an API hack day where all API's including open protocols were on equal footing. At the API Hack Day I went to there were actually prizes for using the sponsors' APIs.

Blocked @work. Please choose a better name for your site (at least the TLD).

Try http://dickeyxxx.com/hackathons

Wow, you have the worst taste in domain names! :)

thank you!

Isn't it pointless for businesses to block .xxx? As porn sites know this will happen I doubt any of them rely on a .xxx

This reasoning only makes since if most porn sites are trying to avoid being blocked. I can't imagine why this would be so.

Every one of these comments is about the xxx TDL. GG OP.

Awesome.

Dickey + I built weft.io for the last Angelhack (a couple weeks ago). We didn't win, but we definitely did a lot of things we were proud of.

That seems pretty cool. Do you have a prototype?

We kinda do -- it's ugly as hell, though (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/63726/weft-presentation.pdf)

+1 we rocked it

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