This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.
I got baited into going to one of those once. I was promised the prospect of spending a dozen hours with friends building something cool, but halfway through I realized we were just doing free labor for one of Latin America's biggest banks and just left.
I'm still longing for events where my friends and I can gather to build something cool, and game jams are the closest I ever got to that.
+1 had a fun Node Knockout experience many years ago making a game with 3 friends. We had a game artist / sound designer, and two engineers with chops on the front-end and back-end.
I think most of the creative energy of building things quickly rightly goes into game jams because they offer the potential of UX creativity, rapid iteration and a joyous product at the end. Coding up a web app can be fun but the output product is almost always business-y and I'd much rather play a dozen games in order to vote, than blank-slate setup a bunch of web apps.
Yep, "hackathon" got co-opted into "free labor" the moment business types sniffed it out. Hackers caught on, left, and now "hackathon" means "business types hyping each other over demo sketches" -- which is fine, but not my cup of tea, and about as far as it is possible to be from the original spirit of hacking.
I had this exact experience. We had a successful hackathon led by the engineering team where we just built cool things that somewhat aligned with the business.
The "Innovation" team decided we were pushing into their turf and took it over. Then it was decided that requiring actual development wasn't inclusive enough. The next "hackathon" was just a parade of PowerPoint presentations.
In this situation, did you have to sign away rights to participate? If you don't sign anything I'd imagine you retain rights to whatever you build, no?
Though I know what you mean, I also kind of saw it as a rite of passage. At some point in your career some guy selling merch under his jacket will come to you with a "great idea" where you will do all the work and he'll be the "idea guy".
It does suck though that hackathons may have devolved into being just that. I haven't been to a hackathon since 2015 and if they've become either dominated by idea-guys or about only making nice looking frontends then that's kind of sad.
EDIT: Oh, I guess I forgot a hackathon I went to in 2017, if you could even call it that. I arrived thinking that we'd be, you know, making actual apps. It turned out I may have been the only person in the entire venue doing actual work. Everyone on my team dicked around the whole time. We were one of 2 teams that actually had something that worked. All the other teams had fake as f*k "prototypes" in programs like Figma and no actually working code. The other team that had working code was just making a Twilio API call. The winner and all the others got attention because their apps looked good. My app might have been ugly but it successfully implemented nonstandard behavior (something you can't just rip off Stack Overflow) and even had authentication.
Now I remember why I haven't been back to a hackathon since.
This happened at a place I worked. There was an internal hackathon where people built things. It was well received and expanded to all employees. The problem was, developers were about 10% of the population there. It became an idea-a-thon, which chased the developers away even more.
Yeah this is for "startup lite" hackathons where the goal is to sell an idea and possibly your team to investors. I had a blast doing hackathons where the goal was just to make the coolest thing possible in 24 (or whatever) hours.
I did one in 2013 where a PhD student researching CFD wrote a full fluid simulation in pure javascript and used it for a music visualizer. It was incredible.
"The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room."
The main goal is to have fun and build something that brings you joy.
The few I went to 10ish years ago had something of a party atmosphere. Free beer and pizza, and the winner was the one with funniest presentation.
Imagine my surprise when they started showing up on new graduates' resumes, eventually I learned that they were more like all night working sessions now.
This is why I participated in only two hackathons, but several dozens of game jams in my life - the "hacking party atmosphere" survived much longer and can (well, could before the pandemic) still be found there. All you had to do is to avoid those jams with official jury panels and non-symbolic prizes, although at times even the presence of jury and prizes wasn't enough to ruin it.
I had a manager offer to put on a work hackathon. It was going to be 24 hours of design and code. I figured it would be fun, even if we were building something for the company, free reign micro project would be cool..
We ended up spending the time building something management wanted, and then playing poker. (I don't gamble so I was rather miffed)
In the end, I think we spent about 4 hours coding up something the bosses wanted.
When it comes down to a 4 minute demo the engineering is irrelevant. Instead spend the time to pick the right words and tell a story with pretty pictures.
Missing the point of what was making people want to participate in old-school hackathons and what made these events fun in the first place. It is true that these days most hackathons are reduced to a pitching contest you describe, and that's exactly what's wrong with them (along some other things).
Not that there isn't a place for pitching contests or people who still find them fun, but GP was talking about how the term "hackathon" was taken over and doesn't mean what it used to anymore.
This exact thing happened to me. I was the backend guy on a winning hackathon team and decided it was pointless to build a real server for the proposed idea. It was essentially a single page app, v nicely designed etc, kind of a half-baked concept but kind of fine. Definitely aligned with the business. It won with the entire backend being mocked. It didn't really matter if there there was actual business logic underneath. I just advised on API design and made sure the idea hung together technically speaking.
It beat some much cooler, technically innovative concepts. It made me not want to participate in another hackathon though. All the fun, nerdiness and actual hacking were replaced by basically building a sensible product demo.
> The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room.
The term hackathon nowadays is almost never related to software development. You can win most "hackathons" with a powerpoint slide, doing actual programming won't win you a price.
Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, the important thing is to recognize when a "hackathon" is actually a "pitchathon" (usually) and to not waste effort doing things that will go unappreciated at a pitchathon (namely, hacking).
Or more specifically, the only winning move is to exploit these pitchathons to meet people with complementary skills ("backend dev? meet UI engineer") and then collectively run the hell away from the event with your expanded network.
Then go do a real hackathon with interested parties, and not business pitches.
It has infact come to this. A lot of people whom I met at hackathons don't participate anymore and it took me a while to realise that this was because hackathons aren't what they used to be.
Seems like the author needs to attend Hackathons where the sole purpose isn't to sell a SaaS prototype to investors and clients. I have been to enough of them where no one cares how fancy the CSS styling on the page looks. Or even that there's a GUI at all. One time the winner wrote a CLI script. I routinely demo API calls using Postman.
Yeah, I've co-organized and attended multiple hackathons, and one of our organization principles is "code is key", to combat powerpoint-only submissions.
That means that there is a code-screening after the submission deadline that ensures that what was demoed was also implemented, and also gives some points in the overall scoring based on execution. We have seen submissions that include a fully-fleged backend including tests, as well as completely faked demos (which were easy to pick up, as what they promised was too far removed from reality).
OP is the kind of person that messages his highschool friends on Facebook talking about how he has an app he designed that he just needs a developer for and it's "like 90% done", but when you ask him for his part of the work he sends you a PSD with the UI design.
We've restarted doing 2-day hackathons at my work, and in the spirit of being as inclusive as possible for all team members, we don't require teams to submit code at the end.
Some still do though, but in the end we want teams to play to their individual strengths and deliver anything they want that fits the theme.
We do pick themes that are relevant to the business, but there are no other requirements, and we do it over 2 days during working hours (and even provide Doordash and Starbucks cards to the teams for meals and coffee), so there's no "free labour" shenanigans or weekend work.
So far it has been a great success, and I believe we've had much higher participation than if we had stuck to the more traditional definition of a hackathon.
The working hours thing alone is awesome -- it sends a signal that "this is a good and valuable thing that you're doing, even if no software for our business comes out of it"
Yep, and let me tell you it took negotiation with leadership to give so many people 2 days away from working on "deliverables" but in the end everyone was convinced that the team building and inspirational value was worth it.
My team managed to negociate half a day of internal presentation/keynote/formation each friday with the management and all the team (with one monitoring production and the whole team on call still). I thought at first it was interesting but without added value, i was wrong. Not only the teambuilding, but also understanding why your coworker work like they do, it help a lot. We also got a lot of hindsight on why stuff are build the way they are, why we have sometime /25, sometime /24 subnets, all historical debt origin, i think this is a net benefit for the business.
Absolutely! It's so easy in large (but I'm sure any size) orgs for teams to not appreciate or fully understand what other teams do, and what decisions get made and why.
It's certainly not necessary, but I agree with you that it can really help collaboration and decision-making even at the individual team level.
Hey! Thanks for telling me what my hackathon should and should not be.
Ultimately we do them as team building exercises, and so _our_ measure of success is about team engagement, participation and the enjoyment of the participants.
Certain ideas absolutely inspire further work on our real roadmaps but that's never the goal.
And so on our metrics, they are a success. But thanks for the feedback.
You presented your _opinion_ as fact, as a direct reply to my message, and so I took it in that context, that it was about our hackathons.
Also then putting hackathon in quotes in your response, implying it's not a real hackathon somehow (again in your opinion), certainly doesn't help your case.
And so this all certainly comes across as a bit of a know-it-all attitude, if you're actually looking for constructive feedback on how to participate in discussions.
The next logical extension of this is: "Front End Developers on Hackathons Are Not needed."
After that, it's "UI/UX Prototype Designers on Hackathons Are Not Needed."
If you want to turn your Hackathon into a Pitchathon, then okay, yes, you don't need any developers or designers of any type, you just need someone with an idea who can communicate that idea. But, that's not really the same thing, is it?
but this is a disgrace to the whole idea of a hackathon and goes against the very spirit.
Business suit people should stop appropriating words from the tech space: what passes for a hackathon submission these days is a PowerPoint presentation with realistic click points. It's still a "deck" which is what they've always been doing
That's a little depressing. The hackathons around here are just people getting together to work on what ever they feel like. There's no jury, no contest, just hacking on fun little projects, helping others.
The observation might be correct in the circle where to author travels, but it does remind me of the dotcom days. You always had this guy: The Idea Guy. He couldn't actually do anything. He just had "ideas", and others just had to write code to make it work. The important part is that the ideas where the thing that matters, coding was something anyone could do... except the idea guy, apparently (much too busy I guess). The plan was always the same thing, the idea guy would come up with business ideas, and a team would code them up, while the idea guy sat in his office, dreaming up the next big product.
Back then those people where basically a joke, but now I guess they're important.
Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.
My organization's most recent hack day was won by the UX team signing up for a free demo of a chat bot service and demoing it - not a single line of code. We haven't had one since, nor do we use chat bots anywhere in our org a few years later.
Hackathons are not about tech, they are about business value now. They are a chance for individual contributors or low level managers to present business ideas to their bosses. Bosses don’t really care about tech.
I won a hackathon once with PowerPoint mock-ups (read: a slide deck). The term “hackathon” means nothing anymore. They’re just pitch competitions anymore.
The last so-called hackathon I went to involved a bunch of idea guys sitting in a room talking about how cool their ideas were. One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough.
Like I did it for free man, can you at least try to say thank you.
I will say I do enjoy game jams, at least then we have something fun to play. I have no interest in prototyping an app for someone else to get rich.
If anyone's looking to participate in a large (on the order of 100 participants or more) hackathon in the near future, this advice is 100% on the money. No matter how demonstrably useful your product is, something with better UX will win 9 times out of 10, even if the idea behind the good UX is inherently flawed and the application isn't even functional beyond the wireframe level (no one will fuzz test it).
I came away from this thinking hackathons were a complete and total waste of time, but at the same time while I've not once won a prize at a hackathon despite participating in several, I have my current job because of connections I gained during one.
Point taken, but jeez, Hackathons are supposed to be participatory/inclusive events. Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks. Full disclosure I am running a hackathon at my company this very week and am nervous about participation and this post made me anxious lol.
I guess it depends on the type of hackathon and project. Not to long ago I participated in a hackathon in which we make a super simple video game. Even though the majority of the work was making the game, the 2 hours used in making the scrappiest ever node.js/express server for arcade-style high scores was the most popular feature by far.
So, in that case, being a scrappy backend proved to be very valuable.
Like 3 hours some people realized that they could just POST whatever to the server and the high scores where pointless, but nonetheless, that small backend (20 lines?) proved a very important point
Yeah, if you prescribe to the smoke and mirrors style.
Sometimes the logic or capabilities of technology have to be explained at a cursory level just to provide some grounding.
I made the same mistake as OP thinking I could dazzle my "investors". It was the early days of VR before controllers existed and I built a few peripherals to compensate for an interactive training environment (savings of 2MM travel/training etc).
Demo was a hit, numbers were a hit, they started asking about tech, adoption, viability...I believed in VR but they needed to believe it was going to be real based on more than my enthusiasm.
Shelved only to be revived five years later with someone else running it following a trail that had been clearly blazed by competition. I was happy for them but always wished I had been given a chance to take that shot before the wave hit. I just lacked the credentials and I was never clever enough to be a "baffle with bullshit" person.
Backend people even just to say: "I am the authority and everything said here is possible. I will show you if you are seriously interested in the mechanics"
This is often true in professional settings. "Just build the UI for this, and the API team will catch up". I object-- give me an OpenAPI spec that we agree upon in advance. Front-end today involves building up a lot of in-memory data structures, and I haven't built something useful if the JSON shape I attempt giving you, is not what the backend team is expecting.
Seems the concensus is that front end is the most imperative thing out of the gate. Seems true in my non hackathon side project, of which I'm the solo dev.
Can anyone please recommend a good front end framework/tool for a backend dev?
I've been working on a project for awhile and the sequence has been:
1. Get requirements
2. Make excellent back end (and clarify functionality, edge cases along the way)
3. Build non sexy front end that works functionally
4. Get complaints front end is not sexy even though it can do very sexy things through the back end
5. Requirements change massively and now I have to tear down and repeat 1-4 with ever-increasing comments about it not being sexy.
Right now everything is django templates + bootstrap + javascript/jquery. It works but is not sexy.
I would recommend mithril.js - simple comes with batteries included. and easy to start with, just include it in the script tag.
with mithril you will find it easier to transition to the big boys - react, vue, etc.
if you wanna start with the big boys, go with svelte though ecosystem is kinda small but the templates etc it's just writing html you're used to.
react if you want something ergonomic and easy to find help with - well that is before the shit called hooks
Hackathons are jokes. I was once lured to one for building phone apps. The winning entry was a team with a PowerPoint. The judges were VC. They’re just fishing for ideas to fund. A great waste of time.
Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience. The coolest thing I ever saw built at a hackathon in boston was a fellow NU student who built a filesystem that completely operated within network traffic flowing between a number of network switches. Totally novel, not fake tech backing a half-baked "business" idea with the IBM watson API.
I stopped going to hackathons after one kid at Hack the North U Waterloo literally tore a muscle in his eye from looking at a screen too long...
> Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience.
I agree. After a couple, the sheen wore off because a majority of the people there either attend hackathons all the time, trying to "win", and fork existing projects with slight variations everytime, or are unable to do anything at all. Wish there were some kind of rules about not using existing personal repo's.
When did hackathons become about "winning"? I thought it was a chance to test out new solutions that your day-to-day job wouldn't necessarily give you the opportunity to explore.
this assumes a lot about what type of hackathon you're going to and why you're going to a hackathon. If you're going to a hackathon that's a judged competition with prizes for the specific purposes of trying to win a prize, this is accurate, but what you're really doing when you attend hackathons like that with those goals is working for the hackathon organizer without a contract, hoping that you'll get paid, knowing that most of you won't. That's not play, that's work. Is that worth it? Maybe. If it's your only opportunity to potentially get paid or you would have nothing to do otherwise or you're really motivated by competition (and not learning/fun/socialization), sure, that can be worth it.
If you're going to a hackathon with the intention of learning/fun/socialization this post is terrible advice. I went to hackathons for years. I never went with the intention of winning. I always enjoyed myself and always got what I wanted out of it. I've never placed first in a hackathon, but I met several friends at hackathons that I am still friends with years later, learned many technologies through attending hackathons, built lots of fun little projects that I'm proud of, and met my wife at a hackathon.
And to all those people saying "that's not really a hackathon", that ship sailed long ago.
There is a professional form of hackathons, often found in procurement opportunities. Participating teams/companies are evaluated via a technical challenge. While not the best way to evaluate for $X-XXXM efforts, they certainly provide opportunity to showcase.
Ive had multiple successes here.
Platform/infra and backend are the most critical parts to get right, and come automated with.
I can staff any team of junior devs enabled by tools like react to quickly implement user interfaces beyond what competitors showcase; but only due to the backbone.
At least for “day job” hackathons this seems counterproductive. A big part of winning support to productionize is proving to the naysayers that an implementation is feasible.
For example, at my current job folks are biased to complex, high-risk AI/ML approaches… Instead of figuring out an imperative solution, senior folks tend to just discard it.
A hackathon is a great way to short-circuit artificial technical road blocks and win support from product and business teams to start with a simple solution.
Just skip everyone except an invision prototyper and a LOB. Done ! Reductive and missing the point of Hackathons, and simply a poor shark tank style pitch-a-thon.
Depends on your idea. For example, if you're actually building a demo that requires collaborative features that others can try in real-time, backend can add a lot to the working and cool factor. Imagine you're making a skribbl.io clone, you can't just fake other user's live inputs.
Ugh, not to get on a grumpy-old-man tangent, but I recall when 'hacking' and 'hackathon' had fairly specific and nerdy meanings, and not 'let's try to knock something up we could do in Figma or another wireframe tool to sell to investors'
I participiated once in a corporate sponsored hackathon and won with a slide show. Those hackathons have nowadays nothing to do with software development and i will never again participate in that. They are almost always about adding business value and some startup crap.
Title should be: Backend Developers Are Not Needed... to win most 'Hackathons'
I can agree with this, as much as I dislike the trend as the 'hack'ing isn't on the system being prototyped, but rather the system of judging the event.
I don't see the point of starting an app without reactive OAUTH2, SQL, and HTTP support ready to use. It strains me to understand what tools people bring to hackathons in a usable form.
Of course not, assuming the goal is demo UX via UI behavior, it's far more expedient to mock backend dependencies on the front end. Is this supposed to be controversial?
This is true, and part of a larger problem where product managers and BAs come in and try to REUSE components conceived in a hackathon. I hope I never have to see that again.
