
From Hackathon to Production: How to Turn Your Hackathon Idea into Reality - ebibi
https://medium.com/oscar-tech/from-hackathon-to-production-how-to-turn-your-hackathon-idea-into-reality-42d18aa9440d
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onion2k
I hate hackathons.

Hackathons represent everything that's wrong with development. People put no
time in to really think about an idea (just go with what sounds 'best' in the
15 minutes at the start), no time to plan (code the first approach that sounds
like it'll work), an unhealthy environment without sleep, exercise or decent
food (pizza and beer are ace, but they're not healthy), and as the article
says, usually no buy in from managers or team mates afterwards. Plus they tend
to be exclusionary because anyone with a family or responsibilities, or who
needs a good night's sleep, is effectively excluded from a team because
they're going to miss a big part of that 24 hours.

It's quite incredible that a health startup like Oscar Health would actually
encourage hackathons.

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itsEtai
Hi there, I'm Tai and I wrote this article.

However, Oscar's hackathon is the second healthiest hackathon I've ever
attended. \- It's closed to employees only. \- It's opt-in only. \- We get 2
workdays dedicated to the projects and there's no expectation to stay after
work. \- There's catered healthy food as usual (via soripe.com) \- The
deadline is soft and you can do work ahead of time. If you don't finish your
project this hackathon, you can pick it up in the next one. \- You're
encouraged to work on passion projects that are not directly related to your
team \- There are prizes for not just Judges #1,2,3, but also People's Choice,
Best Design, Best Product, and Best Engineered.

Any competition can be good, bad, or rotten.

I agree with you! It is quite incredible that a health startup like Oscar
Health would actually encourage hackathons. And it's more incredible that
Oscar seems to be doing it right.

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dbmikus
Definitely agree about putting tying the value of a new product or system to
metrics, if possible. It makes it easier to argue about the worth of the
product and can often tie into important metrics that you'd want to track
across projects.

