How to Run Hackathons in 2024

44 points by nevodavid10 1 year ago | 33 comments
  • hobofan 1 year ago
    The 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).

    • afavour 1 year ago
      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)

      • nusl 1 year ago
        Agreed. Pretty much defeats the spirit of a Hackathon and corrupts it into real-life clickbait.
        • wslh 1 year ago
          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!
          • nevodavid10 1 year ago
            It's because it was released on my blog (Gitroom), so it's the same title. It fits mostly open-source companies :)
            • comprev 1 year ago
              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)
              • ssgodderidge 1 year ago
                I think their point was that the title on HN and the blog was inaccurate based on the content of the post itself
                • gertlex 1 year ago
                  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.

            • eatonphil 1 year ago
              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!

              https://eatonphil.com/2023-10-wehack-postgres.html

              • pitched 1 year ago
                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?
                • eatonphil 1 year ago
                  I posted about it on LinkedIn, Twitter, and a Discord I run.
              • sgt 1 year ago
                > 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.

                • ravenstine 1 year ago
                  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)
                  • makapuf 1 year ago
                    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 !
                    • thefaux 1 year ago
                      Sounds like you may have made the classic engineering mistake of ignoring PMF before building.
                  • goranmoomin 1 year ago
                    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…

                    • ahazred8ta 1 year ago
                      offtopic: earlier you were talking about serialization formats https://cpp.libhunt.com/protobuf-alternatives
                      • 3abiton 1 year ago
                        > 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.

                        • nevodavid10 1 year ago
                          You give value in the end. People do enjoy the competition and win prizes
                        • dongecko 1 year ago
                          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.
                          • acheong08 1 year ago
                            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

                            • brysonreece 1 year ago
                              I really wish there were more non-collegiate hackathons available out there.
                            • lopkeny12ko 1 year ago
                              It's not clear to me how this guidance is specific to 2024?
                              • nevodavid10 1 year ago
                                Well 2023 is finished, so I guess 2024? :)
                                • nusl 1 year ago
                                  No, it's just SEO gaming
                              • spiritplumber 1 year ago
                                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?
                                • culopatin 1 year ago
                                  Can one of your kind souls explain a hackathon for someone who is self taught and feels impostor syndrome?
                                  • deadbabe 1 year ago
                                    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?
                                    • klysm 1 year ago
                                      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
                                    • chx 1 year ago
                                      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.