We took a problem, designed an internal tool for it, and put some Bootstrap UI on top with some fancy CSS animations.
After wiring up the mock data, it looked convincigly real.
We did win, got congratulated by upper management, and were immediately asked if we could get this into production in a week, or do we need 2?
Oh, and don't get me started on the fact that a lot of developers get two relaxed fun days while with catering, networking and basically paid for self-improvement workdays, while QA, supports and other teams are expected to work as usual AND cheer for those participating and watch presentations (thankfully that last is optional).
Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "improvements".
The winning team bought a bootstrap theme for $35 and made a landing page for a nonexistent app.
The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.
Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.
I did a lot of hackathons when I was in school more than 10 years ago and that's how they all were and what every team did.
Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.
At least with hardware, people are actually making something and have to use their brains.
I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.
We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.
AI does a pretty good job of a lot of it... I've mostly been using Rust for my target language, the biggest parts so far in terms of rework/retries has been getting the "experience" how I want it, which isn't really a 1:1 of the classic experience, but updated. Like mouse scrolling for scrollback controls, etc.
There's also been a lot of activities in enhancing the BBS software that remains today (Synchronet, Enigma, Mystic and a MajorBBS remake) along with continued classics and some door games.
Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.
Setting up config files for a tool is not making something. That’s like if I spent hours setting up my IDE, build processes, a CI/CD pipeline, and even unit tests. That might be cool and enhance my productivity down the line. But I still haven’t made anything.
More recently, teams have been attending hackathons with an already completed product, using the event to attend VC meetings instead of doing any hacking. And when they invariably win with a well done, complete product they use the media announcements to generate leads. My duct-tape and cardboard hack doesn't look very good but we designed and built it within the team we assembled 48hours ago.
G0v hackathons in Taiwan are still this, at the end everyone presents what they worked on and there's no judging or anything. Some of the projects have been going for years.
There was a hackathon two weeks ago, you can see all the videos from all the demos here https://m.youtube.com/@g0vTW
They happen every two months. Some people have started g0v chapters abroad, maybe you could consider it for your region!
I had the chance to attend the LibreOffice one back in 2023 but life got in the way and I missed it sadly.
You don't run marathons to be usane bolt, you don't go to hackathons to land VC deals.
24 hours of non stop AI usage doesn't sound fun. It sounds hateful and demotivating, you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do.
In a sense, the latter is kind of about "landing VC deals", but replace VC with possibly a different audience.
I think this narrowness of mindset is more notable in the last paragraph: "...you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do." In my perspective, what I think OP is saying, and I can personally see, is not about what a robot can do (at least no more than when experimenting with a different language/framework/library/etc.), but how far can you shape and accomplish your idea into reality using AI.
"and then this happened, then this happened, then this feature, then this feature"
Wow that's crazy...
What a joke.
I just recently turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller and it took so a little time. It actually makes me laugh
I swear the bar with AI now is just the craziest things that you can think of
That sounds like fun. Do you have anything written up about the project?
It’s definitely not rocket science, but I have enjoyed having more control of it directly, as a musician, to tune it to what actually makes it make sense and be legitimately playable
Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.
But then says this means software is “solved” so only hardware hackathons matter. Why?
If anything, I think software hackathons have become more useful, because ideas have become more useful. Even if ideas are cheap, not everyone has 24-72 hours for a prototype, in a creativity-inducing space that may inspire better details.
And software isn’t solved: some ideas still require low-level knowledge and skill to translate into prototypes, especially if the hackathon judges require some functionality.
Whether your purpose of a hackathon is:
- Make a prototype, then if it seems useful afterwards rewrite it into a full product
- Make a prototype that seems useful to attract investors (whether you start a company that may not launch or apply to a company that wants your creativity)
- As an organizer, find ideas related to your company
- Have fun, enjoy free food and good company
Because ai cannot do hardware, it cannot solder wire, it cannot replace red led with blue one and find current limiting resistor for optimal brightness. It cannot see what part of enclosure needs to be cut. It cannot see the startup transient on the ldo.
It can.
> it cannot solder wire
Plenty of placement and soldering machines exist that are far faster than humans. They just aren't yet integrated with the bot.
For the stuff that is unusual or particularly difficult, just add a human. Same as with code.
> it cannot replace red led with blue one and find current limiting resistor for optimal brightness
Sure it can. Just add a camera.
> It cannot see what part of enclosure needs to be cut.
Challenge accepted.
> It cannot see the startup transient on the ldo.
It can see that using the same tools we use to observe such things. https://github.com/aimoda/rigol-dho824-mcp
I'm excited to see software engineers and teams morph into the next stage of product builders!
I just woke up 2 hours early this morning with my mind spinning but all sorts of cool hardware projects. I could do that now all feel within reach!
Before my list of ideas, never really got much action because I didn't think I could execute on all of them in my lifetime.
But now I'm making notes on all my little project ideas because they think once I get the hang of this new way of working then I will be able to execute on way more projects and it is really becoming quite exciting. But this excitement is definitely going to cause me to have a nap today, lol...
In this case, Hardware hackathon means wiring up the digital or analog input/output pins of an Arduino/Raspberry pi to something and writing software to control/interface with it. Perhaps with a few simple components on a prototype board
Making people feel my pain or communicating effectively quickly I'm total garbage at.
Hackathons are now only this. They have turned into an exercise that highlights my core weaknesses and that's why 25 years into my career I'm going to them almost every weekend.
This is the stuff I really need to get better at and finally, I am. Slowly but also, provably.
Also, this problem is unique: I call it "the trailhead". You get deep into the problem (the trail) and forget what it looked like at the trailhead and thus fail to compel the product because you spend your time on the wrong level of details and the wrong aspects.
That's why you can pitch something not yours better then your own stuff.
I feel your way some times too, and when I reframe it and share with others from a place of interest and passion and let go of performance & anxiety, I usually don't come across as total garbage.
When my daughter was 4 y.o. she went to robotics classes where they assembled a small LEGO robot and made software for it using environment like Scratch. That's a good activity, but my point is that doing some assembly doesn't put the task into entirely different category of difficulty
> ...the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code...
> ...iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task...
The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware?
Since the advent of SBCs and microcontroller kits, software devs have felt the same way about hardware being trivial. Yet, a hardware engineer still makes a massive difference in the outcome of the project.
It's the rotary phone and the raspberry pi, of course. Don't gatekeep.
The fact that microcontrollers are so cheap now means for most (but, sure, not all) applications they're strictly superior in every way compared to e.g. 555 timers and LM386 amplifiers, or whatever. This is because, critically, you can debug and reprogram a micro. To do the equivalent with a 555 timer means, at minimum, de-soldering a bunch of components and probably poking around with a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope.
What's more, you can get a full tcp/ip stack in a surprisingly small and low-power package these days. No need to futz with analog telemetry, or even SPI/I2C unless you really need to.
The "hack" in TFHackathon is altering the function of a phone. Who cares if they used a ras pi to do it vs something else? In what possible way does that diminish their feat?
We’re in the age of human hand crafted creativity.
Imperfections of value.
Really? Maybe if we do not care about robustness, elegance, coherence, consistency and generally anything beyond making a buck and leaving more waste behind... sure!
At least game jams still carry on that general spirit and the people that try to put together stuff with AI immediately make it obvious.
A couple examples (both from HackPrinceton, which had the best EE labs):
* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/electronic-banjo (crowd favorite)
* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/spin-to-win (a "moonshot" idea)
There's something nice about holding your work in your hands. Tangible work is also both easy to explain, and hard to fake. So going the hardware route felt fun, fulfilling, and scored well.
Good times.
I begrudgingly went to one a few months ago and I was absolutely shocked, it was a two-day one, not even going to mention the programming language because at this point it probably doesn't matter, since only about 20% (tops) of the talks/presentations were strictly about programming.
A small assemble of self-defined industry champions took the floor once after the other to preach about their holiness and the outstanding work they have done for the community in areas that bordered software engineering as much as Iceland limits the Indian Ocean.
It was lecture after lecture, it was lifestyle, it was virtue-signaling, it was everything but programming. There was a single ham-fisted workshop that did not even had enough time to build on the basics of what was trying to accomplish, and there was a guy who I had as a personal hero of sorts that went in there to talk about some internal package manager drama.
NEXT! never again. It's all rotten to the core.
It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y
We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com
I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).
But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.
I can’t imagine going to a hackathon just to not write any code and outsource it all to an LLM. I wonder if any hackathons ban LLMs?
The other presentation that stuck out, iirc, became leet codes.
Enterprise is just fishing for other people's ideas that they can use as their own
If you truly had a novel and useful idea, someone else can just steal it and recreate it themselves
I think any idea of discipline demonstrations will get whittled away until its more like battlebots or robot wars
I am only judging the ones I was offered to send in teams but always refused. They appeared to be a rip off and and let's call it as it is: shit show.
I don't think that a hackathon solves anything worthwhile. If it would, why not make everything a hackathon? Why don't declare the exception the rule?
Good stuff takes effort and time. Crunch mode or death march as I used to call it because with their pale faces after three weeks without any free time, was generally something I despised and prevented in the first place.
I build the only successful Web Application in Financial Systems in a global bank and I knew we need to think smarter with all the responsibility and accountability. So we always sharpened our axe first.
I let my best devs work as much and long as they wanted because if you are in the zone, you exploit it. And yes, quite many freely worked at home on weekends as well, but I pushed them hard to not put this into the normal work stream in order to prevent any fake improvements that come to hurt them.
I gave them the promise to any free time they wanted and when they wanted given that they take care of their absence beforehand. I was never disappointed and people work differently. One guy worked month on no end, and suddenly hit me 9 pm "Boss, I need a break, give me two weeks starting tomorrow." Always granted without any hesitation.
Sprints? 80%, not 120% masked as "challenge". No dev gets bored. They need the feeling of being free to do their craft.
It worked best.
That's why I never personally as well as with any of my teams took part ever in a hackathon.
If you have kiddos in Germany: jugendhackt.org
