

How to Save Time at a Hackathon - paulmelnikow
https://medium.com/@paulmelnikow/how-to-save-time-at-a-hackathon-abe7846747b5

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butwhy
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...

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rdpickard
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.

~~~
bhayden
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.

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lostmypassword
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.

~~~
bbody
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.

~~~
lostmypassword
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.

