How to Run Hackathons in 2024
gitroom.comThe title of the blog post should be "How to run a Hackathon if your only objective is to trend on GitHub".
I've been to many hackathons and also organized a few, and this is one of the most soulless incarnations of a hackathon I've seen.
In my opinion on of the coolest things about a hackathon is the ability to live out your creativity and be free from perfectionsim to have a change of pace from your traditional day-job in software engineering, so we've also always tried to enable that when organizing. Eliminating that by providing preformulated ideas like this here proposes kills that at the root. They state that they do that in order to prevent everyone from picking the same idea, but there are good other measures to do that like having a scoring system that factors in creativity (and penalizing people working on the same idea).
In my experience this is the problem with a great many hackathons. I stopped attending many years ago when I realised the people who made the best presentations were the people who won, not the people with the best hack.
(not saying they’re all like this of course. But a lot were)
Agreed. Pretty much defeats the spirit of a Hackathon and corrupts it into real-life clickbait.
Could you please suggest good resources about running hackathons? We organized a few and will run a new one soon and there is a lot of room for improvements. Thanks!
It's because it was released on my blog (Gitroom), so it's the same title. It fits mostly open-source companies :)
It's a blogpost about marketing not engineering, and the submission will no doubt be used in the future as an example of "growth hacking" (i.e Trending on HN is an achievement)
I think their point was that the title on HN and the blog was inaccurate based on the content of the post itself
Indeed. Seems like the title should be "how to run hackathons to get github activity".
And the "in 2024" part... A few ways this can be interpreted:
- How things are going to be different from prior years. First thing that came to mind... "AI tooling must feature a lot now?" Maybe this will be an article about what guidelines to have for use of ChatGPT? (or maybe that it's a non-issue)
- When it was written... seems to be what the author had in mind based on another comment.
I ran a hack week a few months ago about postgres internals and it was super fun!
There weren't prizes, it was just about getting ~100 devs into a discord for a week and seeing what happened. Most people who stayed involved posted an update once a day or so and as people wrote blog posts or published a project I added it to the hack week page.
I'm looking forward to doing more in the future on topics like compression algorithms or emulators or CPython internals.
I'd also love to see more companies doing hackathons not just about using their product but implementing minimal versions. How better to find out how devs perceive your product, let alone a chance to teach your community and identify potential hires! If you want to try this I'd be happy to chat with you about my experience!
I’d love to be doing more hacking like this. How do you go about advertising it? In the sense of, what should I be reading to find out about it?
I posted about it on LinkedIn, Twitter, and a Discord I run.
> hackathon is a (physical or virtual) competition where people contribute code to you in a manner you decide on and get prizes.
Having been through a couple of Hackathons, rest assured that there are plenty of Hackathons that are more focused on the business case rather than the implementation. I've seen hackathons won by teams that didn't write a single line of code. It was all mocked up in Powerpoint or similar.
What sucks is when there's a complete mismatch between those two hackathon approaches. I once went to a hackathon where both engineers and designers were invited; the winning team and the teams with the most praise were all the ones dominated by designers that didn't actually implement anything working, and the more engineering focused teams were pretty quickly dismissed. Worse yet, I was literally the only engineer on my team willing to contribute any code. It didn't matter that mine was one of the few projects that actually worked because it didn't look as pretty. (it was a podcasting app that allowed users to leave audible reactions like applause/booing/awww on episodes)
I'm trying to organise a hackathon now, where there will be two phases : ideas / ppt phase, then implementation where anyone can implement any idea, and both are praised/rewarded separately. If the best idea is implemented several times, that's a good thing !
Sounds like you may have made the classic engineering mistake of ignoring PMF before building.
I'm still on the fence on whether I think this is a good idea or not…
It does feel like frabricating/buying github activity with money… but it also does feel like I can't argue that they are doing something with malicious intent…
offtopic: earlier you were talking about serialization formats https://cpp.libhunt.com/protobuf-alternatives
> It does feel like frabricating/buying github activity with money
You can frame plenty github projects with this logic, at the end the community also benefits.
You give value in the end. People do enjoy the competition and win prizes
I have been to a couple of hackathons as participant and as organizer. Some sessions where really good and some were really terrible. The biggest takeaway for me in organizing a hackathon is to keep in mind that technical people who participate tend to be rather competitive folks who put a lot of soul into their work. So if you have no fair and clear evaluation system and PowerPoint designs compete with code, frustration is sure to happen.
I remember you popping into the ChatGPT-Hackers discord (which I’m no longer part of) a while back with your guide on how to get GitHub stars.
I really don’t like the gamification of GitHub stars. It feels like abuse from marketing departments
I really wish there were more non-collegiate hackathons available out there.
Check out the site Devpost for public, online hackathons (https://devpost.com/hackathons?challenge_type[]=online&open_...)
How should such a thing play out? Because I like the idea. But I am bit sure how it could be done
I believe if you put really high prices like the big tech companies, you will get it!
It's not clear to me how this guidance is specific to 2024?
Well 2023 is finished, so I guess 2024? :)
No, it's just SEO gaming
Last time I was at a hackathon there was a bunch of drama about openROV, but it was like, 2011. Should I give it a try again?
Can one of your kind souls explain a hackathon for someone who is self taught and feels impostor syndrome?
Developers meet at one place and code something from scratch for about 48 hours straight, often working in teams, and then present their creations live to an audience and get scored on various criteria. Was that helpful?
Not sure the imposter syndrome is really relevant here. Hackathon is effectively throw a bunch of hackers in a room for a weekend or something and see what you can hack together
If you run an in person Hackathon (or really, any event in 2024) then please read https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co... first.