Comment by gue5t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gue5t | Hacker News Reader

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In general hackathons are based on the idea of programming as producing objects/products/services (which all decay over time), rather than seeing programming as the act of codifying understanding of a formal (or informal) system into an executable representation (which its users continue updating to match their mental model for as long as they find it useful). The purpose of many hackathons being "build apps/widgets on top of our service for us!" presupposes the former view.

Looking at programming this way is harmful to all of us (because it encourages us to spend time building things designed to decay out from under their users, or that could be built as contributions to open-source libraries, but which wouldn't be a "startup idea", "product" or "mvp" anymore), and it would be nice if folks in this thread took a moment to step back from the things they've built (which are fun and useful, most of the time!) to think about working on ideas as contributions to open-source infrastructure libraries rather than standalone programs or services.

Programming toys is fun; programming universally accessible, near-permanent extensions to human capability is exhilarating.

I'd like to pre-empt the response of "people should be able to write apps and toys and services if they want!". Of course they can. I just want to make sure people have considered an alternative point of view, since it's easy to never step outside apps culture.

I really disagree. I've participated in a few hackathons and they are among the best ways to quickly accomplish and learn new things while feeling some of the joy we all ultimately want from programming. Being able in one day or weekend to go from scratch to a working prototype is just a great way to kick yourself into gear and remember what is possible in programming. I've participated in hackathons for embedded devices and other interesting projects that I'd not normally pursue, and to show to your friends after only a couple days some really cool gizmo you built from scratch that does something fun, well, that's awesome.

Beyond this, hackathons are also great at surrounding yourself by a ton of knowledge and talent to learn something very very quickly that you might struggle to learn on your own as quickly.

And finally -- a lot of devs work remotely or alone, and hackathons are excellent at developing skills of working in a team. And also just getting the in-person enjoyment of interacting with others who are interested in the same thing.

A single hackathon is only a day or two. What you get out of it compared to the time you spent is huge.

I disagree in that most hackathons aren't "hackathons". They're events where companies want you to use their product to "advertise" how awesome their product is to the community. Sure you learn things, but most of the shorter hackathons, you're learning very very shallow things that you didn't need to go to a hackathon to know.

> I really disagree. I've participated in a few hackathons and they are among the best ways to quickly accomplish and learn new things while feeling some of the joy we all ultimately want from programming. Being able in one day or weekend to go from scratch to a working prototype is just a great way to kick yourself into gear and remember what is possible in programming.

I guess it depends on your experience with hackathons. I entered my first one last year, and it totally ruined them for me. The winning team wrote no code at all and had a powerpoint presentation and mockups using images and image-maps. (I've complained about it more in past comments :P )

It seemed like we were actually punished for trying to code. I asked if we were allowed to set up backend servers on something like DO or AWS, instead of using our laptops for the demo. "Sure, of course that's allowed." Until I got to the venue and found out they were blocking SSH and most other non web-browsing traffic. I had to tether to my cell phone in order to deploy because according to them, it was the venue and not their problem.

I spent a good amount of time helping out people who were using the same framework as us and didn't understand it well (Ionic). So I made some friends and contacts that way. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be really shallow. I haven't heard back from most of them, and of the two I have, one asked me to design their squarespace site for a stupidly low price, and the other cold-called me sometime later asking if I was interested in writing content for their startup ("Oh, no, we're not looking for devs at the moment"). Of course once I declined their offer, no contact, no friendship.

I'd be down to try a different one (the "stupid idea" hackathons seem like the most fun and least competitive), but the only upcoming hackathon in my city is the same one from last year I'm currently complaining about...

None of your points really responds to the parent.

You can bootstrap or even finish a small FLOSS project during a hackathon and perhaps assemble a team that will keep contributing to it.

Yeah, my problem with hackathons is that too many people treat them like they are a beginning point of a startup.

Hackathons are to startups as martial arts tournaments are to the martial arts. You get good at the tournament by training for tournaments. But that's maybe 5% of what it takes to be really good at the overall practice. And in most cases, to get really good at the tournament, you have to do things that are only useful in tournaments and are actually anti-productive in real-life scenarios.

I still do weekend prototyping sessions, especially on my own, and there is a lot of value to that, so long as it's understood to be about learning. But from most of what I've seen about hackathons, that's not why people are being asked to come to them, and that's not why people are there.

Yes, the "make a product" and "COMPETITION" aspects of hackathons sadly have become widely dominating. I always liked the more low-key events more, where it was just an excuse to come together with others interested in the same space and do something.

You've cherry picked to say "worthless projects" vs. "exhilarating open source", yet someone could easily cherry pick "world changing projects" vs. "pointless open source." There is no more nobility, in my opinion, in another food delivery hackathon app vs. another 1 of 100 JavaScript frameworks that people don't need.

What, exactly, is a "universally accessible, near-permanent extension to human capability"?

Here's an example: you can get a computer to play back recorded music trivially. The code that makes that happen is almost entirely open-source; if you think about the shared (between, say, doing so on your laptop and an RPi) portions of the stack making that happen, you're looking at exactly the kind of code I'm describing: unassuming, portable open-source libraries that expose composable building-blocks for doing things.

Love your comment! Less hackathons, more open source summits. Build foundations, not garbage to be thrown away.

Is it one or the other? You can do both, right? Open source is great; as is building for the future. That is no reason you can't write something fun during a hackathon once in a while.

In my 20 years of professional coding, I've seen a lot more problems with people promoting code to shared status, attempting to build a foundation, before it's been used and before it's even remotely ready than I've ever seen with people throwing away good code. We're taught in CS school to always abstract and generalize, way too many people run with that and write code that abstracts away their specific problems, and build foundations that aren't sitting on the bedrock of solving a real problem. Almost all open source projects that start with the aim to build foundations are thrown away.

On the flip-side, one of the common goals of a hackathon is to build the best and most useful idea you can, quick and dirty, without getting mired in foundation building. The utility of that is to prove the idea is useful first, and if that succeeds for someone, what better starting place is there for building a foundation?

Not to be too contrarian, but I'm a 45 year old developer whose (basically) only code that is currently in production is what I've made in the last year. Code is generally eventually thrown away, whether it's garbage or not.

I suppose my thesis is hackathons don't promote end results with longevity, versus libraries and other foundational tools.

I'm not against throwing code away. I'm just not sold that the results of hackathons provide value.

I'm thinking that the 'hackathon' is an experience, not a production technique. It has value in the teamwork it creates, the enthusiasm it kindles and so on.

> Code is generally eventually thrown away

Some code is doing useful work after 30 years, some after 10. Hipster stuff is called "ancient" after 1 year. Most hackathon stuff is dropped after 2 days.

That's false... OP gives an example in another comment here.

Opinions are subjective.

Code is not generally thrown away. Look at all the code in your OS. It's not opinion unless you refuse to look at facts.

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