Hackathons as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Hackathons as a Service

123shipit.blogspot.com

18 pointspzaniewicz11 comments

Serial hackathoner here. This misses the point of hackathons. A hackathon lets you dedicate time to building hacks you think are cool, learning new things, and meeting and making friends with other hackers. This is just programming quickly with little sleep.

Moreover, hackathoning as a lifestyle is a poor decision- you can only take so much pizza and caffeine every single weekend.

Thanks for your insight from a serial hackatoner perspective. It`s true, there is no way we can make "commercial hackatons" day after day, that would miss the point. But to make from time to time fast MVP with client, it doesnt sound so bad IMO

That's not a hackathon; it's poor planning and obscene expectations. Once again a word has been coopted and loss all meaning by corporate interests.

There's a difference between a Hackathon and a barn-raiser which is what you're talking about.

This is a great point. I'm a serial Hackathoner too - I love going to Hackathons. But they're social events with code at the core and possibly you'll make something cool. Mostly you'll learn stuff and make new friends. The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is the canonical example for me.

What you're talking about is not really a Hackathon. It's appropriating the word, and doing something that looks superficially similar - doing a binge of coding - but it's not the same thing and ultimately sounds counter-productive in the long run for me.

Just my 2c

My experience with Hackathons has often been that in the days immediately following the hackathon you have to invest a LOT of time to clean up the mess.

Everything that was done post-haste, not documented, not version controlled, so on and so on.

To make the project usable, manageable going forward, requires plenty of effort to now redo or improve upon the messy state left from the hackathon.

Certainly I can agree that there are some gains made from the hackathon environment that are lost working in a normal business environment and pace (lets say iterating faster on product while its in infant stages). However, I'm not sure that many of the principles apply after that, when having to continue maintaining and collaborating on a more mature product.

The hard truth is that 9 of 10 applications (commercial or start-ups) are just mistakes. So whats the point of delivering well documented and beautiful designed app that nobody use? That is why i think that hackatons in order to deliver good enough product and test your hypotesis does make sense. If it`s a market fit, then i agree - lets clean up the mess and develop it in normal way

Certainly agree on high failure rate. Unfortunately for most, that is not achieved in the span of a hackathon, or using the style of hackathon development, which cannot be sustained.

It often takes months to reach product-market fit... and if you have a team of people working on an app together, and you are having customers sign up and use your app, you need it to look beautiful, and your ability to collaborate with colleagues over those months needs to be functional.

I think thats a very interesting idea. If the market is there, it could be very good for both hackers and the company.

Thanks for insight! I hope that somebody somehow will test this hypotesis :)

Thanks again to the OpenBSD team for creating something that inspires everyone else! ( hackathons )

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