

Hackathons as a Service - pzaniewicz
http://123shipit.blogspot.com/2013/02/hello-world.html

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igul222
Serial hackathoner here. This misses the point of hackathons. A hackathon lets
you dedicate time to building hacks you think are cool, learning new things,
and meeting and making friends with other hackers. This is just programming
quickly with little sleep.

Moreover, hackathoning as a lifestyle is a poor decision- you can only take so
much pizza and caffeine every single weekend.

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pzaniewicz
Thanks for your insight from a serial hackatoner perspective. It`s true, there
is no way we can make "commercial hackatons" day after day, that would miss
the point. But to make from time to time fast MVP with client, it doesnt sound
so bad IMO

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adestefan
That's not a hackathon; it's poor planning and obscene expectations. Once
again a word has been coopted and loss all meaning by corporate interests.

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LogicX
My experience with Hackathons has often been that in the days immediately
following the hackathon you have to invest a LOT of time to clean up the mess.

Everything that was done post-haste, not documented, not version controlled,
so on and so on.

To make the project usable, manageable going forward, requires plenty of
effort to now redo or improve upon the messy state left from the hackathon.

Certainly I can agree that there are some gains made from the hackathon
environment that are lost working in a normal business environment and pace
(lets say iterating faster on product while its in infant stages). However,
I'm not sure that many of the principles apply after that, when having to
continue maintaining and collaborating on a more mature product.

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pzaniewicz
The hard truth is that 9 of 10 applications (commercial or start-ups) are just
mistakes. So whats the point of delivering well documented and beautiful
designed app that nobody use? That is why i think that hackatons in order to
deliver good enough product and test your hypotesis does make sense. If it`s a
market fit, then i agree - lets clean up the mess and develop it in normal way

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LogicX
Certainly agree on high failure rate. Unfortunately for most, that is not
achieved in the span of a hackathon, or using the style of hackathon
development, which cannot be sustained.

It often takes months to reach product-market fit... and if you have a team of
people working on an app together, and you are having customers sign up and
use your app, you need it to look beautiful, and your ability to collaborate
with colleagues over those months needs to be functional.

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oellegaard
I think thats a very interesting idea. If the market is there, it could be
very good for both hackers and the company.

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pzaniewicz
Thanks for insight! I hope that somebody somehow will test this hypotesis :)

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stare
Thanks again to the OpenBSD team for creating something that inspires everyone
else! ( hackathons )

