I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

Sales manager: Hi all, we are launching a new internal hackathon. Form up a team with the right expertise to help with address the problem statement and get going!

Me: what’s the problem statement?

Sales manager: you have to sign up first. There’s proprietary company info with our plans for next year involved. You have to agree to terms and conditions before continuing. Legal say so.

Me:

*signs up*,
*fills in docU-sign*,
*clicks through 3 other screens*

Ok let’s see this problem statement.

“What new and magical customer experience can you create and launch to win in our markets”

... that’s not a fucking problem statement ... and why the fuck does that require filling out a docu-sign form to see?

I REALLY fucking hate legal / sales people. Wasting everyone’s time.

Hackathons should not be judged by non-technical people.

I went to a Hackathon yesterday, and only two teams (mine included, of course 😉) made projects that I thought sufficiently fulfilled all the judging criteria.

The winning "project"? Literally just a two slide proposal about asking Niantic to turn the summer time free lunch distribution bus into a Pokestop. Because obviously the best way to motivate children who can't afford food to go get free summer lunches is to use a tie-in with a smart phone game. Because Niantic is so famously responsive to community requests. Because you can totally turn a bus into a Pokestop.

It was absurd, and I have no idea how it fulfilled the "impact" and "viability" judging criteria (as for the third criteria, "innovation", I suppose not coding anything at a Hackathon is pretty innovative!)

I knew that some flashy bullshit project would win, even if it was utterly unviable, but I didn't realize just how disgustingly absurd the winning project would be

Another hackathon is over.

Didn't win this one either but I am slowly recognising my weaknesses and (hopefully) getting better.

A good night's sleep and I'm ready for the next one. :)

Beyond Hackathon 2017 @ Athens, Greece

GENDER DISCRIMINATION! -_-
If you are a GIRL, there's a HIGH chance for you to win the Hackathon. If you are a BOY, well... :|

So a team of 3 went to a hackathon. One of us didn't know how to code, the other just front end and I back end.
So we started with some ideas and choose one, starting to code it.
After we were about 80 precent into it at the end of day 2 (the event had 3 days) one of the coaches came to us, saying our idea is already a launched startup out there and we had to have a change of idea at the beginning of the third day.
Other two completed the simple front-end of the new idea about 7am and went to sleep.
And I, while was awake for 50 hours already, had to code backend of a minipay app from scratch in 10 hours.
That was HARD for a newbie like me, but in the end I did it.
We didn't win anything. But that was a really great experience for me. Plus coffee was provided infinitely there ;)

We're having a mini-hackathon at our school last Saturday as a final exam of our Web Engineering course, showcasing what we learned throughout. The theme is all about helping university students gain their productivity and improve their interaction with technology.

Me and my team tried to create a note-sharing platform for students. We loved the idea and we're so excited to create it. But excitement turned into shit hole during development.

A fuckton of merge conflicts, divisive code conventions, and usage of god-awful Bootstrap for front-end came in. 😱😬😣

Despite these things, we are able to win the hackathon (i still can't believe we won). but he worst part of winning is that the prize is not cash nor the internship (the judges are from the company who somehow looks for interns), but fucking useless GIFT CARDS!!

But in the end, we're proud of it. I thought that it will be just a concept but in the end, it became real and it turned out to be great. ☺

Had to do a presentation about our fov sports... Lel

It was the worst local Hackathon. It's not even a Hackathon either, where the whole event spanned over 2 months.

It was a group entry with me and 4 teammates. Each of them did contribute:

Guy A: criticizes what is built and designed
Guy B: offered financial tips on how to make this thing feasible
Guy C: did UI but in graphics. No CSS file, just bits of graphical elements.
Guy D: family commitments

And then there's me, writing documentation, built the entire project, wiki, drove the project, prepared the presentation slides, tests the framework, unit tests, stuck with stupid problems like SSL, localhost, Google Maps Key and the likes.

And we didn't even win, let alone launch this thing, whatever it is, to anywhere. Never doing group projects again.

I'm flying solo for now

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

there should be a dev show like the voice but instead of the voice it's a hackathon and people vote for who they want to win

and you can view the players in real time and play all their demos when judging