Ask HN: Any tips on organizing a fun hackathon at work?

[tagolli]

Hey HN.

We are trying to organize a hackathon at my workplace. The main goal is to have fun and engage with others. The hackathon will happen during normal working hours and will be voluntary, so the goal is not to get some more work out of people.

Do you have any positive/negative experiences you can share? Any tips on how to have a fun hackathon?

[Bostonian]

Maybe I'm cynical, but a hackathon at a company just sounds like an invitation to work more, perhaps even overnight. If the hackathon is truly voluntary and the code will open-sourced or written for some good cause, that would be different.

[tagolli → Bostonian]

I'll edit the post to reflect it, but it will definitely only be within normal work hours and voluntary.

[antomeie]

From my experience, developers often feel pressured to achieve a lot of work in a very short period of time, possibly using technology that they are not so familiar with, in order to build a “Proof of Concept” of something. I have experienced this myself several times. The rest of the company are having fun being creative and “brainstorming” stuff, making presentations, while developers are stressed out in order to finish coding something before end-of-day presentation.

My suggestion is that developers know in advance what they will work on so that they can make sure that the scope is within reason. It also allows them to get started right away in the morning, without needing to wait around for a project to surface. Also, don’t force someone to come up with an idea themselves.

[tagolli → antomeie]

That makes sense. I was planning to write up some ideas that people can just take if they want. Also, seems like a good idea to have people pick what they're working on before the actual hackathon starts.

Do you have any example of what non-technical people worked on? For example, we have QA members and I'd love to include them, but I don't have as many ideas as I do for developers.

[IvanaSays]

I worked at Algolia when we wrote a blog post about this, hope it helps: https://www.algolia.com/blog/engineering/6-hack-day-tips/

We recently had a fabulous hackathon at Retool, I'll chime in shortly, or ask someone else to.

[tagolli → IvanaSays]

Thanks for the article. Looking forward to your comment!