
Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon? - iqster
This is really to vent my frustration. I've participated in about 6 hackathons in the last year. 4 in the SF Bay area and 2 in NYC. Today, I'm at the Foursquare hackathon in NYC. It seems the majority of people are just talking and networking. Now it is possible that these guys have learned to code without keyboards but I highly doubt it. I am not pissed that people are networking ... this should not be the primary activity. Otherwise, we should call it a bloody mixer!! The thing that really pisses me off is that these chatterboxes are going to show off completed apps ... ones they have not built at the hackathon. Now seriously ... in the few hours at one of these events, you simply cannot create a polished app unless you have a large group of developers who are seriously coding. I have seen such efforts (e.g. at the iOS hackathon at Paypal earlier this year ... people were actually coding inside the auditorium and talking outside).<p>I'm really frustrated by this state of affairs. I don't come to a hackathon to pitch my latest startup app ... I come to code. In some instances, I've decided not to present at all the end of the hackathon cause most of the other teams are presenting an extremely polished piece of work (again, I have BIG doubts that some of these are done during the event).<p>Anyways ... vent complete. It would be nice to know I'm not alone.
======
jorgeortiz85
Hey isqster,

I'm Jorge and I work as a software engineer at Foursquare. I'm sorry to hear
that you're frustrated at our hackathon. Certainly some people are chatting
and socializing, but that's only natural when you put a lot of people in the
same room. From what I can tell though, the vast majority of people are
actually building something today.

Some people have brought projects that they started before today, but I think
that's not necessarily a bad thing. The hackathon wasn't meant as a sprint to
see who can churn out the most code in a day, but rather a gathering of
developers who are excited about the Foursquare API and what can be built on
it. We want people to share ideas about what they're building and what's
possible to build on top of our API, and yes, also to encourage people to
build new stuff. (That said, not everyone has brought prior work to the
hackathon! I know at least one team that has built several apps on top of our
API in the past, and they've started a genuinely new project from scratch for
the hackathon.)

If you feel the main room is too noisy, there's lots of side rooms at General
Assembly which are a little quieter. You'll see teams in the side rooms making
generous use of the white boards to design their app and plan out the
necessary work for building it.

Again, I'm sorry you're feeling frustrated. If you have any suggestions on how
we can make future hackathons more conducive to coding, feel free to ping me
in meatspace. (I'm sitting against the big white wall by the water cooler. My
name tag says "Jorge".)

~~~
catch23
One easy way is to give away prizes to the top 3 apps built at the hackathon.
The reason why people actually coded at the iOS hackathon were the prizes (I
attended). Obviously submissions built prior to the hackathon would be
disqualified so this prevents people from building it, then attending.

There's still lots of socialization, but I believe hackathons should be
centered around code, otherwise you might as well just call it a foursquare
mixer. There were lots of really cool apps built at the iOS hackathon -- I'm
really glad it was so hacker-centric, however the prizes were significant.
Paypal gave away 3 iPads to winners that night.

Also, if the goal is to get people learning about the foursquare API -- the
only way people will learn is by practicing. I learned a lot from others at
the iOS hackathon -- even stuff I thought I already knew well. I think
foursquare would get a lot more mileage if they just added a few small prizes
to fuel competition.

Some of my friends are marathon runners -- they say that if the city
sponsoring the running event offers no prizes, almost no professional runners
will show up, but if the city offered a $100 small prize, there will be a
significant amount of pro athletes attending. Does foursquare want pro hackers
attending, or do they just want scavengers who are attending for the free
food?

~~~
lurker19
An iPad is not a significant prize. A professional developer earns an ipad
every day or two at their day job, and that is guaranteed even for the fourth
best work product of the day.

~~~
catch23
Significant compared to most hackathon prizes is what I meant. Most hack day
prizes are a pat on the back or useless company schwag. I don't believe
hackers attend hack days for the purpose of actually making enough money to
fund their living styles.

------
dons
The Haskell ones tend to produce a lot of code: but we plan ahead on what to
work on, and turn up with small teams.

More info on how we do planning:
<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hackathon>

~~~
robryan
I guess it has a bit to do with the different focuses, at the foursquare event
your likely to get people who are trying to grow a business, so networking
will be a primary goal of theres and it is advantageous to them to show
something more polished to get some attention for the project.

A quick look at the Haskell page shows you guys are more focused on the
language and supporting libraries themselves, which I assume most people are
doing it out of love for the language and programming rather than any
commercial gain.

~~~
dons
The focus is primarily about building open source infrastructure, so yep, for
the love of code (though often informed by commercial need).

------
pamelafox
I've been to many hackathons both in the SF Bay area and in the Sydney area,
and I find the Sydney ones to involve much more hacking.

I think many people in the tech scene in the SF bay area are there because
they want to get in on that scene, because it's the hot/$$ thing todo, but
they don't actually have tech skills - so when they come to tech events, they
either find a way to not hack, or they find someone to hold their hand through
hacking.

We don't have that problem in Sydney. Basically everyone who is in the tech
scene is in it because they truly like tech and have the skills. (Or they will
try damn hard to develop the skills themself.)

Generally, I find we have a higher quality of developers at free tech events
in Sydney than in San Francisco for that reason. I was pretty happy when I
moved from SF to Sydney and realized that I no longer needed to figure out how
to filter the pseudo-techs from the Google tech events that I organized.

~~~
dekz
Maybe moving to Sydney is something I should look into, theres the occasional
meetup (ruby, node communities (in a library :P)) but that's all there seems
to be. Brisbane is rather dull in many ways.

~~~
zizee
What's the best way to get in contact with all the Brisbane based hackers so
we can get the scene off the ground?

~~~
Dylanlacey
Funny you should ask this today, I just sent out a notification for YBITS, the
Young Brisbane IT Social.

The idea is to get a group of like-minded young (of mind) IT professionals
together in a 'networking' format that doesn't feel douchy.

It's part of my cunning master-plan to give Brisbane a bit more of a startup
scene, but most of the attendees are still un-aware:P

I think it'd be a great venue to kick something like that off, do you want to
work together on something? YBITS is here:
[https://groups.google.com/group/YBITS/browse_thread/thread/4...](https://groups.google.com/group/YBITS/browse_thread/thread/413d027aa053f656?hl=en)
(That's the link to our march meeting) and you can contact me via my details
here.

------
nyellin
I recently attended a NightOwls meetup in Tel Aviv and had the same reaction.
I still plan on attending events like this, because:

1\. I can program at home any night.

2\. Hackathons allow collaborating in person with other hackers. This is much
more valuable to me than pure programming.

3\. Hackathons are perfect places to find co-founders and developers,
_because_ they mix of programming and networking. I can demo apps and
informally meet the people behind them all at once.

Edit: In all fairness, NightOwls isn't meant to be a hackathon. I used it as
an example because it emphasizes _working and getting things done._

<http://www.meetup.com/Tel-Aviv-Nightowls/>

~~~
robryan
The night owls concept is generally a fairly short event to, so most people
don't come expecting to get to much done rather to work in a bit more relaxed
environment and interact with other like minded people. (In the Melbourne
version anyway).

------
donohoe
I share your frustration. I think many of the trendier companies have a
tendency for it to end up being networking and also about being seen at so-
and-so's hackathon. It's a 'scene' for many ppl who wanna be 'hackers' but
really are not.

My biggest pet-peeve at hackathons are those who turn up with full working
hacks they did prior. Nothing wrong with that but please have the courtesy to
not enter them into the competition against the poor smuck (like me) who only
had the last 12 hours to pull their hack together.

~~~
JBerlinsky
I actually feel like your event (NYTimes Hackday in December) was pretty good
along those lines; I didn't get the feeling that any of the applications had a
significant amount of pre-writing code-wise.

~~~
donohoe
Glad you enjoyed it. We should be doing it again this year too.

There were a couple with projects that were written a week+ prior but we
factored that into the conversation when giving out prizes.

~~~
JBerlinsky
Cool! I dunno if we'll be able to make it out again (we were the Night
Scheduler guys), but I'll definitely see what I can do.

Really? There were a couple that I could see that being a possibility with
(the Etsy/Flickr guys), but I didn't even consider them as contenders seeing
as how they sponsored. _shrug_

------
JBerlinsky
Were you at the NYTimes Open Hackday? My teammate and I flew in from Michigan
(to be fair, I'm originally from the Tri-State area) to participate, and we
damn well weren't just there for networking. That having been said, the
networking is incredible. I participated in a Yahoo! Hack U event up here in
the great white north, and landed a job this summer out of it (and an offer
from Yahoo, which I wound up turning down); the offers that a little bit of
networking at the NYTimes one turned up were incredible as well.

Honestly, it's all about balance. My teammate and I spent 99% of the time at
these two events coding. We walked in with absolutely no code pre-written, and
emerged from both events with a fully-functional application, the synthesis of
which we plan to put into full production in the near future. However, the one
or two hours of networking that we engaged in, be it during "hacking time" or
not, were extremely valuable (and, arguably, helped shape part of our final
applications).

Just my two cents.

~~~
ams1
I was also at the TimesOpen Hack day, and spent most of the day coding. There
was a lot of chatter there, though (some of it contributed to what my app
eventually became). Bring headphones for when you need to start building.
Thankfully no one there presented deckware.

~~~
JBerlinsky
Were you one of the Trippy guys? Really liked your application. I was one of
the two Night Scheduler developers.

~~~
ams1
Yep!

------
frankdenbow
I was wondering why they were being selective on the people who could come to
this. I really wanted to come and learn more about their API but it seems as
though they were picking people who already built on it. Isn't the point of
these events to get new people into the ecosystem?

To answer the question, yes people really do code and come up with solid apps
at these events. Check out the music hackday apps that were built last weekend
at the same space:
<http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=NYC_2011_Hacks>

~~~
timjulien
Send a message to my github account when we do the next foursquare hackathon
and I'll do my best to get you in (<https://github.com/tjulien>). We maxed out
the number of attendees based on how many people the space could hold. There
was no criteria of having used our api before.

~~~
frankdenbow
Will do. It was more packed than last week?

~~~
timjulien
About the same number of people as at music hack day, I guess

------
epnk
We attended the Foursquare hackathon yesterday as participants and ended up
winning with our thedealio.at private messaging app.

To be honest, the only thing we had completed prior to arriving at 1:00p was
that we knew the idea. We had no name, no code written, had not heard about
the new API features released, nothing. So at least it's one datapoint that
the winners aren't all pre-developed, polished products.

For me, the biggest benefit of hackathons are that you are absolutely forced
to use all sorts of skills, not all developer-focused. We had to discover a
problem that was worth solving for a lot of people (P/M fit, I suppose). We
had to battle with stupid issues like buying an .at domain name and having my
credit card get locked up due to an overseas suspicious purchase, then having
to wait for DNS to propagate so we could get an SSL certificate issued as
required by a new feature of the Foursquare API. Also how the look and feel
should be, the UX--simplicity, fun, and engaging. We spent the first three
hours writing no code, just getting our game plan in place.

Then of course in the actual development we broke all kinds of rules like code
duplication, no testing, editing code directly on the production server, etc.
We focused squarely on speed, knowing that time would be our biggest threat.

Which brings me to my main point. Building any software product is all about
compromises, and knowing when to make them. It does go against the spirit of a
hackathon to bring a polished product to demo, while just networking all day.
We didn't do that and did okay. But only by using every means available
(including pretty much skipping dinner).

I hope that the possibility of polished products doesn't hurt the hackathon
spirit, and this post is mostly to offer encouragment that single-day hacks
can still hold their own. There were some really great hacks there, and the
ones I know that were built just yesterday were among my favorites
(4squareand7years being my particular fave).

------
rdl
I have a hard time actually hacking at such events, but I've seen great
development work happen in a slightly different context --

I think the ideal format is a pair of events, separated by a week or two. At
the first, you present some cool new technology (a new sensor, embedded
platform, api, etc.). You show some examples of how it works. People get
together and discuss, form teams, etc. Then, during the next week or couple of
weeks, they get together in person at other locations, or collaborate online,
to develop stuff. Then, there's another big public meeting, where successful
projects can be demonstrated. Best of both worlds. Maybe at the second session
people can beta test, give feedback, etc.

(I'm actually at SuperHappyDevHouse 42 in San Jose right now; learning more
about Intel TXT in a corner with my laptop, while other people play board
games and socialize...)

~~~
Firehed
I'm at SHDH as well (hi!). There's definitely a mix here, but I think part of
that is because of the venue. The only reason I'm on HN right now is that I'm
waiting for a screen scraper to finish, which is terribly slow on the wifi
here. I was hacking until my battery died, at which point I decided to explore
and mingle a bit until an outlet opened up. At past events, it was a similar
mix - certainly not 24 hours of pure coding, but it's an environment where I
can hack away on stuff I've been putting off for a while and still enjoy
myself. YMMV.

------
matthewsimon
I was at the same FourSquare hackathon today, and you're right -- there was a
lot of socializing going on, and there were people who seemed to be trying to
figure out how to present their previously-existing project or startup.

On the other hand, the New York hacker scene is anemic enough that we can use
any chance to socialize and network that we get -- and there were people there
actually coding things from scratch today, myself included.

I had to leave before the presentations, and haven't see most of the apps
people have been working on, so I can't comment on the "overly polished"
aspect of this... But in an ideal world, I would hope that people would be
able to enjoy whichever aspects of the event were relevant to them, and not
get sidetracked by the people who were on a different track.

------
jrockway
Absolutely. Eventually you sink into the code and forget about the chatter and
your shitty laptop keyboard and you can get a lot done. A few hours later, you
can come out of it, get some beers, and go back to sitting at your desk for 12
hours a day.

Some software I've written at hackathons:

<https://github.com/jrockway/eslide>

<https://github.com/wjackson/hiredis-raw>

------
zdw
Yes, they can be successful, if people are focused.

For example, see this account of a recent OpenBSD hackathon:
[http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2010111509113...](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20101115091138)

------
thehodge
as someone who regularly competes in hack days and has won a few, there is
nothing more annoying than having someone come in for a few hours, add a new
feature to an already developed product then enter the whole thing in as a
hack, a lot of the time the Judges don't know and it just promotes the tactic
to other people...

~~~
andrewpbrett
How would you enforce that only work done doing the hackathon is presented as
the entry? Not trolling, genuinely curious and looking for suggestions.

~~~
thehodge
When we run hack days we do simple things like check when the domain was
registered, check if its indexed in Google and a few other things but what we
also do is have at least two developers on the judging panel that can judge if
someone has cheated or not... It does work both ways though, we almost lost a
PayPal hack day last year because the judges believed we had worked on the
product previously when we had genuinely built it from scratch in 24 hours.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkKRO4Po_g> is the video of our presentation
btw :)

~~~
albedoa
I'm glad you guys weren't disqualified, but I'm lol'ing at the irony of PayPal
judges presuming guilt and asking you to prove your innocence. Good to know
that they carry that policy everywhere.

------
usaar333
I've always found my productivity (especially in regards to debugging)
dropping massively when I'm stuck with just a small laptop screen. So with
coding efficiency dropping so much, it only makes more sense to seize the
moment and do what you can't at your home/office: bounce ideas around with
others.

~~~
robryan
As someone who usually works from home I find that coworking gives me enough
extra concentration that outweighs the using a smaller screen than usual. Also
having your team in the same room every now and then does wonders for tracking
own bugs and planning new features.

------
MatthewHolt
We've now run 5 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Code-a-thons (we have some
Federal gov cooperation and they wont let us call then hackathons!). Sure at
each one there is chatting and networking but at each one somewhere north of
100 people produce anywhere between 8-12 teams each of whom show what can be
built in a short day (9-5). While they're not always fully completed apps,
most are, and most have been terrific.

And while it's OK to bring in something that's been worked on before, most of
the teams at the code-a-thons meet at the day and integrate medical
professionals with coders.

So anyone who wants to come code at an event where what you build might really
make a difference (not that we dont love Zunga & FourSquare, but....) check
out www.health2challenge.org

------
stretchwithme
Maybe competitive events get more people coding?

I went to the first SF startup weekend where 40 people tried to implement a
single idea. A democratically selected idea which was the first choice of very
few people.

They have since switched to competing self-selected teams and much better
ideas and implementations resulted.

See? Distributed decision making works better for many things.

Anyway, my point, besides the blatantly political one, is attend events where
the structure and rules are conducive to what you want to do. And if the rules
aren't published in advance, call and find out. And don't be afraid to leave
if you think you're time will be wasted.

------
christefano
The code sprints and hackathons we have in the Drupal community in Los Angeles
are highly focused on a specific task or event with an actual deadline, so
everyone is _expected_ to participate. There's always something for non-
developers to do, from user testing and content editing to being in charge of
food or music.

------
danw
Can't say I've had this problem at any of the UK hackdays I frequently attend,
only the US ones I've been to.

I think one of the differences is having an overnight. The networkers and
loiterers bugger off after a few hours leaving just the developers and
designers overnight who want to actually make interesting things.

------
parad0x
I notice this happening a lot in our area as well. When we host hackathons we
try to have a topic to focus on as well as project ideas and open source
projects ready to work on.

I think opening a public git hub repo with what you want to work on then
having people pull that down can start some great coding sessions.

------
txt
Hey, I actually took a train from long island to the city this morning
expecting to take a tour of 'general assembly', (where this hackathon was
hosted)..But I didnt get past the elevator because of the hackathon! I wish I
had known because I would have love to have been there coding with u iqster!
Anyway, I plan on becoming a communal member there next month after they
review the thousands of applications they have recieved.. iqster, did you get
a chance to talk to any of the founders of general assembly there or anyone
that is a member?? I talked to Matt Brimer for 5 mins next to the elevator, he
couldn't sit down and talk with me because of the hackathon! I was planning on
taking a tour and joining today but BLEHH! Do you have aim or skype iqster?

------
kevinburke
They should probably just rename them something else.

~~~
tudorizer
I agree on this one. Don't call it a "hackathon". Misleading solved.

------
smallegan
I think you'll find that many gatherings are like this. Tech Conferences in
particular seem to fall into this category where half of the people are there
to network and the other half are there for the meat and potatoes content of
the conference.

------
jlees
I've been to several multi day and one-day hackathons, mostly in the Bay Area.
I've shipped code at every single one, but I definitely share your
frustrations at those who turn up and demo stuff they built elsewhere. I also
have had trouble actually socialising at some hackathons, because everyone was
so focused on their own project they didn't want to talk for 5 minutes about
their problems (related to the app I was building to solve them). Oh well!

I think clearer rules around "look, guys, congratulations for doing a startup,
but this is _not_ the place to pitch your year-old app" would immensely help.

------
heliodor
I participated yesterday. It's my second hackathon. I get your frustration
with the typical hackathon.

My approach is to focus on finding the right people and the right concept at
the beginning of the event and to get to know them better while working with
them. The goal is to walk away with some new relationships. I spend only a
small amount of time talking with the rest of the crowd.

At an event like the foursquare hackathon, I'm not really concerned what
happens with the presentations. At other events, like TechCrunch Disrupt or
Startup Weekend, I would.

------
EGreg
I did. The only hackathon I ever did was a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon last
year. I stayed up all night, and made a real-time, semantic question-and-
answer site where you could invite your friends via instant message.

It didn't win. Some robot that stabbed imaginary people in the air won.

It looked like most people there used existing software and just added
something onto it. If I knew that, I would have come and added something to
YouMixer.com ... I think I would have won :)

Update: I just went there and it looks like it somehow took off in spain!

------
wiseleo
I compete fairly by writing 100% of code at the event, but I also have a
product that I wrote and implemented as an API. It is a powerful API similar
in scope to what Tungle likely has (I don't have access to a competitor's
API).

When I demo my hack, I de-emphasize the use of my API. In effect, I grab a
couple of sponsor APIs, mix them with my own API, and create a product.

I talk with teams for a while and help them when I can. In the end I take 24
hours to simply code.

------
shava
I just got out of the Tor hack day in Cambridge MA (which I hear may become a
monthly event, yay!). We divided into two rooms: soft ware (code) and soft
skills (documentation, policy, how to run a server on your PC,
fundraising,...)

I thought this worked pretty well, although I can't say either room was
lacking conversation! But in our case this is also about community building
for an open source project - slightly different agenda.

------
hydrazine
I was at a Zynga Hackathon at Berkeley a year ago. I suppose it's true a good
amount of networking goes on, but that didn't bother me too much. I was really
there just to hack something together overnight, and my team actually moved to
a separate location so we wouldn't be disturbed. So overall it was a pretty
good experience despite what other teams were doing. Hope you also feel this
way in the future!

------
yesimahuman
The last one I was at my team built an interesting HTML 5 game with impactjs
in under 24 hours (we sponsored the hackathon). There were a lot of cool
projects built in the same time period. However, the biggest problem was non-
workers who just wanted to chat with people who were actually working. It was
very distracting and I bet many of the projects would have gotten further
without the distractions.

------
silent1mezzo
I've been to several hackathons in Ontario and there's always tonnes of coding
getting done. We had 19 apps one time.

~~~
brunoc
Same thing happens in Montreal.

------
andrewvc
This complaint is kind of like complaining about people going to dance clubs
to socialize and hook up rather than dance.

OP, I'd suggest you accept the current state of affairs, or start your own
event focused on what you want to do. Why rain on other people's parade?

------
code_duck
I've observed this sort of thing in a few coding contests recently - coding
contests that were poorly designed. It is quite unfair to people who want to
follow the intended spirit, you're right.

------
andrewfurman
Does anyone know if a hackathon has been held where there were active
measures/rules/restrictions in place to ensure that all development was done
within the period of the hackathon?

------
chewbranca
Yes, I just got home from a code for america datacamp hackathon at socrata in
seattle, was a lot of fun and quite productive.

------
d3x
I have done several hackathon's and I have always coded the entire project
there. I usually do all of the planning and organization ahead of time but I
always complete the code during the event. Thats part of the fun of it IMO.

------
mkramlich
solution: start your own event. call it Actual Hackathon (TM)

