Hackathons are like gyms

I'm a female in tech. And this totally speaks to me -- please try not to make general comments like "as a female in tech". It has much more to do with your experiences than being female. Granted, I competed in Olympic lifting and played a college a D1 sport in college. (Plus, I'm pretty sure I could out-squat gaillees.)

Hackathons are also like gyms in that too much of them results in injury. Be careful not to get too carried away, folks. Last semester, I went to around a dozen hackathons. I had a lot of fun and made some great connections, but I don't think I actually accomplished very much in terms of productive code output.

Ok, so now somebody write the hackathon analogy of this article:

http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/everything-you-know-abou...

The article basically shows a guy following standard gym routines of lifting on balance balls and such. And he meets a legendary strength coach who puts him on squats and the bench press for the first time and calls him little girl weak.

I'd love for a hackathon champion to write a post about realizing how hackathons don't make you a good programmer, and maybe he goes to train under Donald Knuth who calls him script kiddie weak and has them do weeks of advanced sorting algorithms.

I think you got the right idea here...but the brogrammer rhetoric just completely fails to relate to me as a female in tech.

Hackathons are more like the competition you're training for than putting your time in at the gym. Without frequent, consistent, measurable training you won't see any significant improvement in either lifting or programming skills. That said, it's always good to have a goal to train toward and hackathons can provide that.

Hackathons are a great supplement to accelerate learning, but anyone who wants to build decent products needs to learn things the right way at some point.

Hackathons are a great for innovation. I hope to see more startups spin out of them though!

hackathons are indeed very supportive learning environments, just make sure to comprehensively relearn topics picked up at a hackathon

Hackathons are also a lot like gyms because some use the time to flex their abs and pecs infront of other techies.

This analogy just keeps on going!

Hackathons are less like gyms and more like playful matches in the park. :)

Gyms smell like desperation, sweat and fee--hey, the metaphor totally holds!