My Second Hackathon Changed My Life | Hacker News Reader

My Second Hackathon Changed My Life

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103 pointsjonmarkgo21 comments

Loved this story. I can completely sympathize. I had been programming in school and for fun a little before my first hackathon, however I had not yet made any "real" apps. I attended my first hackathon a few years ago (pretty sure Jon was there). Like Jon, I joined a team of people with much more experienced than myself. They taught me a lot, helped me get started, and got me hooked on hackathons. After this hackathon, I started learning about web development, meeting others in the community, and of course attending more hackathons.

If you are at all interested in programming or learning how to program, I encourage you to attend a hackathon. Check out some great ones here: http://mlh.io/events/

An inspiring read - I know of so many people that got dragged to their first hackathon thanks to persistent friends, myself included!

Every single hackathon I've been to since have inspired me in one way or another - be it trying out the latest tech, the buzz from working on a hack over a short period of time, or just meeting & sharing the weekend with super awesome people!

The hacker ethos is extremely transferrable as well, it's a mindset I promote a lot when I teach Computing to my secondary school students in the UK. It's all about getting the learners to take control of their own education & be as creative as they want about it.

Proud to have MLH at the forefront of revolutionising how students learn, build and share ideas around technology. Very excited to be part of this growing global community and cannot wait to see what's to come!

If you're in the EU, I would highly recommend checking out these upcoming hackathons (drag a friend along too!): http://mlh.io/eu/

Hackathons are a lot of fun and I enjoy attending them. I'd love to see them get more diverse. MLH has been a great organization to work with so far.

One of my favorite things about Hackathons is that no matter where you are in the world you meet people who are interested in the same things. They're not just interested though, they're capable.

The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants.

> The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants.

Me too. Our most recent participant survey said that the most important three things to hackers were:

1. Fast Internet 2. Good Food 3. Healthy Food (different than good food apparently)

I would add Sleep to the list. I would be interested to know how it was ranked in your survey.

Most people at hackathons don't acknowledge that they need to sleep, which is bad for both their health and their productivity.

I've had a couple of meals with Jon & Swift (founders of MLH) and can speak to their dedication to the hackathon community. They're really trying to encourage experiences like these for students around the country.

Hackathons are the reason I got involved in the larger tech/startup community, an indirect (but crucial) reason I have a job right now, and have really come to be a very important culture for me. The work of MLH and Jon have made a large part of that possible.

For those curious about the history of hackathons, Jon has a really great talk that he gave at HackCon last year about the history of hackathons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6VPAe9CKU&index=1&list=PLP...

Agreed, great guys leading the charge for the community.

I took a bunch of high-school students to the MLH Launch hack in London and they had an amazing time, and were really inspired by everything that was going on around them.

Unfortunately although MLH were very supportive of under 18s attending the hackathons, the venues weren't so accomodating, and it doesn't look like were going to get to go to another one.

It would be nice to see more under 18 hackathons being organised to help inspire and engage teenagers. We have YRS in the UK and it's fantastic, but it only comes around once a year.

Both MHacks and PennApps accept high school students. Sadly, the venues are usually universities with strict policies but there are still many that allow <18, like CodeDay events.

Sadly, neither are on the west coast!

Both provide travel reimbursements and there are tons of HS-friendly hackathons on the west coast. HSHacks, HackGenY, LAHacks (IIRC they were cool with <18). Definitely could use more though.

The difficult part is getting in without any other Hackathon experience.

Not sure about the UK scene, but I know hackathons for high schoolers in the US can also be challenging. I'm listing a few resources that have helped me below:

* CodeDay - These happen around the US multiple times a year, there's likely one near you. I've helped organize a few of Austin's and they're a great organization. I would reach out to them to see about possibly getting an event in London going, don't know if they're able to expand internationally though. http://codeday.org/

* HS Hackers - This is a Facebook group that was made a couple of years back at PennApps. It's now a community of 3,000+ young hackers. https://www.facebook.com/groups/PennAppsHS/

* A handful of HS-focussed hackathons: SoHacks (http://sohacks.com/), HSHacks (http://www.hshacks.com/), HackBCA (http://www.hackbca.com/), HackGenY (had international participants this year)(http://hackgeny.com/)

* HackEDU - Nonprofit started by @zachlatta that's starting hack clubs all around the country. I led ours in Austin and will lead it again next year: https://hackedu.us/

Interesting, I'm glad to see people have positive experiences with Hackathons despite my own being horribly toxic. The reasoning given in the article is actually the impetus behind my decision to ditch hackathons (and later the "development" community in favor of QA Automation).

The 'competition' portion of a hackathon usually messes me up in both approach to the work and the desired end goal. Whereas it seems to be a major portion of the attraction for the blog author and a lot of people in this thread.

Perhaps it is a matter of teammates that I have participated with thus far, but trying to hack together a minimum-passable-product (note: not even viable but ~passable~) stuck me as an utter waste.

If you go into the event hoping to build something productive or that has longevity, it will likely feel like a waste. But that's really not the point of hackathons, and seems to be a major factor that people take issue with. Especially for students/new programmers, the goal is to tinker with technology, have fun, and discover like-minded collaborators in a risk-free environment.

You might be thinking - hey! a competition isn't risk-free - but really, compared to a work or academic environment there is far less risk involved with building something ambitious or using a technology you are completely unfamiliar with. The best hackathons don't focus on the competitive element, but instead create a system where people are rewarded for ambitious but not perfectly polished work. I wrote another blog post about that here: http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...

I could not agree more with everything that you talk about in this post. StartupBus was my first real hackathon and it definitely changed my life.

I love reading stories like these. I hope more people in the community share first (or second) hackathon stories.

+1. If you have a story to share, email us at hi@mlh.io. We'd love to share it with our community!

Really enlightening post - gotta love what's been going on with the hackathon community over the past couple years!

It's amazing how far things have come. I remember when there were only maybe 5 student hackathons happening every year. Now there are like 150 and they're happening all over the world.

/me wishes was still student sometimes

The student hackathon movement has definitely evolved super quickly in the last five years (as Swift says, 5 -> 150, or more than 100% growth year over year). I'd be curious to hear more stats about how hackathons in general have grown in the same time period.

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