How to Save Time at a Hackathon | Hacker News Reader

How to Save Time at a Hackathon

medium.com

14 pointspaulmelnikow7 comments

So the author wants people to use dropbox over git because a repo takes too long to set up. Then their idea of version control is to copy files out of dropbox to somewhere else at random intervals. What on Earth...

Disclaimer: I know the author.

butwhy, I understand the confusion, but I believe the intent of this suggestion is to not burn time trying to get people who have not been exposed to version control systems up to speed with git. Recently I've been working with people who are not professional developers and realized that even with a good front end like GitHub, VCS is a rather large concept to absorb.

While the benefits of VCS far outweigh the work to grok the ideas, the rate of return may not be high on the small timescale of a day or afternoon at a hackathon that is aimed at interested but relatively green individuals.

Given github has a desktop interface that is super simple and easy to understand and can be explained in a single sentence, I am not sure there's any reason to not use it.

It kind of reads like the author doesn't know how to use git... In no way shape of form would I use Dropbox as a repo.

I have however had experience during a hackathon with a team member who was doing some HTML stuff who didn't know how to use git. I opted to just do the merges myself manually, never would have even considered moving my code to Dropbox.

This is horrible: among other head-scratchers, author advocates "saving time" by blatantly cheating. A "clever (sic) rehearsed demo" that "covers up" the fact that you didn't actually write the application code you say you wrote isn't saving time, it's cheating. The point of a hackathon demo is to show how much progress you made towards an idea in a given amount of time, not to put on a smoke & mirrors show.

In defence of the author, I think he means take some short cuts if time is short to show your business logic. It makes more sense in pitch-a-thons where the pitch is central and the demo is usually only given a short window of time.

I'm going to continue operating under the assumption that Author intended his advice to apply to traditional hackathons, since that's the language he used.

> I think he means take some short cuts if time is short to show your business logic.

Even if that is the case, covering up the fact that you took a shortcut is still cheating. It's fine if, during your demo, you say something like "this is a mockup modeling the backend, we plan to implement xyz functionality using abc stack". At a hackathon, people get that, and if you show good effort and use of time otherwise you're not going to be dinged on that alone. But faking it to look as if you did more work than you actually did isn't right, and isn't fair to the other hackers.

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