My classmate is a real SAVAGE!!

He (team leader) and his team participated in hackathons several times and kept losing.
He noticed something common about winning team, majority of those team members were women, even if they were non technical and their project was pure bs, they were winning in the name of women empowerment.

This time he came out with a plan, he fired his boys and invited women into his team, and even made one girl the team leader.
Result? HE WON!!!
NOT ONE BUT THREE HACKATHONS BACK TO BACK

AND

His so called women team was invited by Google to pitch their startup idea.

Now, if they gets funding, he's gonna kick out these women and bring back his teammates

Maintain your LinkedIn, write little articles about implementations on a tech blog, check issues on popular github projects and make PRs, create a portfolio website. Register as a company and do some freelance work, even if it's just a cheap website for your grandma's knitting club.

Do the tour/tutorial of every popular language/framework. Learn the basics of react/vue as a backend dev, learn some sql as a frontend dev. Set up a vps server at DO or AWS, host a few small services. Fullstack is bullshit, but communication is key in development, which means you need to know about the whole playing field.

Recruiters can be useful, but knowing developers in your area is even more valuable. So especially if you're unemployed, go to hackathons, conferences and meetups.

When hackathons are sponsored by Google

Top 5 reasons to come to Hackathon
1. Experience for your CV
2. Free swags
3. Networking
4. Free swags
5. Free Stickers (swags)

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

So my friend thinks that only hackers can participate in Hackathons.

Poor fellow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Went to my first Hackathon this weekend.
There was 6 of us, 3 devs (including me) and 3 business guys for the presentation and info gathering

The 3 business guys wouldn't show us any of their work, but we're demanding to see all of ours.
Bothering us every 5 minutes to see 2her4 23 are and what's left

Then 1 of 3 business guys accused one of my devs of deleting half of their PowerPoint presentation. That turned out to be bullshit. Looked in the edit history and the business guy was the one who deleted them.
We brought it up to them all, and they got all defensive.

Then, before they revoked our access to the PowerPoint they removed us from the presentation entirely.

Their final presentation contained an app(APK only) we spent an all nighter on, and pictures of a few of the wireframes we did.

I immediately went to an event organizer, filled a complaint. Showed the wireframe project, the source code of the APK they used, and told her they just dropped us and stole our work. She went to them, they couldn't prove they did the work

They are now banned from future hackathons at this place.

I do not appreciate being fucked with, and more so don't like it when you try to fuck my friends. Honestly want to send an email to the business guys workplace and inform them their two top employees are thief's.

The positive thing I took from this is me and my dev team built a stronger relationship and found out we work amazing together.

/Rant about trash humans

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

Hackathons these days :/

Worst experience? Probably that in my area are no Hackathons.

After participating in so many hackathons, I finally won. Now I know how it feels and it's awesome. 😀

So I attended my first ever 18Hr hackathon and we named our team "Losers", as a matter of fact when our team won they pronounced us as "....and the Hackathon Winners are Losers", funniest dumb shit ever, I'm gonna start attending more hackathons from now on.

Wondered if their are hackathons for kids, turns out - no :(
But I found this gem:

So, went to 3 hackathons in the last 3 weeks. Won 2/3. Developed on Ethereum and some Iota for the most part. Loved this experience and many more to go. Idk what to say honestly, just blabbering :p

My first two hackathons I didn't participate as coder but as staff, because I didn't have team neither considered myself ready for it, I swore it was never going to happen again. Never again was I going to be on the sidelines watching everybody else code.

!dev but definitely rant

Here's a fucking thought:
How is holding women over different standards at events and (non-physical) competitions (hackathons especially, somehow) NOT widely considered sexist? I don't even mean towards men - yes, of course.
But also towards women: By preferring their results in some competitions in order to "support them", you implicitly degrade them to be small children in need for praise. You imply that you expect them to perform worse. By "women-first" PR bullshit, you do what you claim to be against. Fuck you.

Why can't we just hold everyone to the same fucking standards? Women can be just as good in tech as men, when interested. I would even make a point that these different standards hold back women from trying to get into any tech-related career.

Some people think that in the software industry there is no communication and everyone is glued to their screens doing their work. It really fucking pisses me off.

- We write documentation around our code more than actual code so that we can communicate with other developers better.

- We use version control and pull requests to make sure our work is at the required level and it is approved.

- We invented UML to communicate our technical understanding to less technical people.

- We sometimes have more client meetings than doctors have patients. In which we have deal with clients worse than patients.

- We conduct keynotes and conferences and hackathons to bring together communities.

These are just a few things from the top of my head so next time you think of saying that the IT or software professionals don't have "much" communication you better fucking educate yourself as to what the profession actually is.

Not having any hackathons in your area

When did hackathons become competitions for developing websites, and move away from being competitions for gaining access to network resources (ie: hacking)?

The worst part of hackathons are schedules which leaves no time for actual coding!
I was once at 2 day event. Day 1 contained an intro lecture, 'getting to know your team' exercise, idea generation phase, idea feedback from industry people, mandatory coffee breaks, and a little bit of coding at the end.
Day 2 consisted of 'adding thet final touches to your hack', a random lecture from the company hosting the event, info from the judges on how to pitch, a trial run of the pitch and then the final pitches...
I barely think we got to code for 3 hours.

Hackathons? No thanks, I don't participate in self exploitation tournaments.

I hate hackathons. I am a fan of sleeping 😌

The best dev team I have been with is during college where the three of us who were working at a maker space would go to various hackathon and stay up all night to build cool stuff! (We won prizes at quite a few hackathons too!) The other two are pursuing their masters in a different college now, I miss going to hackathons with them :( Hoping that we get to go to a hackathon together soon!

Yeah, So the principals of hackathons is shit and am about to braek down to fucking cry.All you do is waste 48hours of your life discussing your ideas with irrelevant startup managers who will just shatter your dreams with a single sentence "this is already in market, what have you creat new?" For fuck's sake, it's my first hackathon , you guys have given me just 10 hours ,i have a team of worlds most idiot devs and i am their equally idiot if not more leader... However my idea was 1000% real and authentic and worth finding... if not, then at least give me prize for creating 9000 lines of code with 2 IOT devices and a working , documented model which no other fuckin team could do.... AND even not this, then FUCKING GIVE THE PRIZE TO SOMEONE WHO DESERVE IT, AND NOT THE TEAM FROM THE COLLEGE THAT SPONSORED IT.. fucking politics -_-

Give students opportunities to create beyond the course requirements. Think hackathons, clubs, department projects, etc. So many cs majors don’t do anything beyond schoolwork.

Is anyone ever "hacking" anything at a hackathon these days?

Seems more like "building 40% of a CRUD app really fast!"

(but maybe I'm seeing the wrong hackathons)

I've been in the programming world for like a year and a half. I've had relatively notable achievements - first place at hackathons, completed kinda remarkable projects, I even got to teach programming to interns at a leading communications company in my country. However, I still feel like a beginner. I'm not confident enough to contribute to projects. Maybe it's because I'm self taught, but is this common? When did you feel like you were ready to proceed to the next level?

Code is not the only thing I do. Sad but true.

Sure, sometimes I just want to scream "JUST LET ME CODE", but internal hackathons and PO 1-on-1s make me feel like there's a meaning beyond my 34 open tabs.

My first hackathon when I was in my university. I never used to work on any side projects apart from assignments and academic projects. I was so shocked when I saw that people were so dedicated in developing a working product in a weekend sacrificing sleep and food. I got so depressed that I wasn't doing anything and people around me were doing so much!!!!! That's when I was motivated to learn more, do more, work more. After this, I never missed a single hackathon while I was studying :) I'm so much better at what I do now because of hackathons.

!rant
Update & Thoughts of AngelHack10 Abu Dhabi.
The judges were so non technical they were impressed by an app demo (not ours) that could recognize objects printed in black and white on an A4 paper. The app claimed to read the 3d shape of a device and calculate the running cost based on its power consumption.
I think hackathons must have two pitches one technical and one business. Else every one with hardcoded demos can fool the judges easily.

Spent last 2 days thinking of a good App Idea for a Hackathon. About 15 ideas later
Error 404: Shit to do not found!

I HAVE BEEN CALLED TO 3 OF THE FINEST HACKATHONS IN MY COUNTRY RN, 2 BEING ORGANISED BY HUGE COMPANIES AND ONE BY A COOL COLLEGE. I CAN'T GO BECAUSE FUCKING INFOSYS IS COMING TO MY COLLEGE FOR PLACEMENTS AND MY TEAM MEMBERS ARE NOW BACKING OFF. WTF.

Our school encourages us to go to hackathons.
I want to but I don't have a laptop and don't want to be the absolute madman who brings his whole desktop.

Attended my first hackathon this weekend. Had a blast and even won a prize for being voted by other hackers as the best/most interesting project. Had a blast and I will definitely be going to more hackathons soon :) Just wanted to share some positivity for those of you who are thinking of going to your first hackathon

When I see other students projects at hackathons

My worst hackathon, was a 3day hackathon without free food. But it had free coffee ☕ !

What are your thoughts about competitive coding and hackathons in general?

I sometimes feel that practices which are important for maintaining and structuring the code gets lost in the spirit of competition. Also, more hacks are kind of used to finish the assigned tasks rather than a proper approach.

Nasa space apps challenge. Come with innovative ideas and have a option to win.

I've done 24hr - 36hr hackathons twice and won't recommend it to anyone XD. The toll it has on your body is huge. I literally felt I lost 1 year of my lifespan going through that hackathon. Lots of coffee and tea. Felt sleepy and had a headache for 2-3 days after that

In our country there are only one or two hackathons a year :((((

Are the hackathon groups for people with debilitating social anxiety?

Asking for a friend.

Me: I'm going to a hackathon this weekend.

Parents : are you sure it's legal and you won't get into trouble? You know, it seems to involve hacking

Took some time to explain the concept of hackathons. Same happened with a lot my friends. Many of them actually go to hackathons now.

Hackathons in one picture 😂

So there was this regional hackathon in which the company I work for is a major sponsor. It happened that the company had an empty slot at the talk panel and until yesterday there was no one to pick it up. I ended up taking it on with a couple of coworkers. The talk just finished and I have never felt so ashamed. The talk was cringe-worthy to the point I felt the shivering skin of the audience. Man... never taking a bullet for anyone ever again!

I just bought a ukulele, and I have the urge to put stickers on it like it's a laptop. Hackathons have ruined me.

hackathons are just 24 hour contracts where you test some company’s api in exchange for free redbull

Hackathons are so crowded these days!

Hackathons are best places to explore new technologies and learn much more

I love hackathons where I have a team and all but 1 or 2 ppl including me are still programming for 24 hrs instead sleeping.

48 hours hackathon, Before 20 min everything working good and fine. Finishing touch and everything breaks. Finally, fixed 5 min prior to presentation start. Panicked to toes, were asked to present first. Result: Runners up. Hell yeah.

That I've never been able to attend a hackathon since they are ALL always on the weekend. I'm Jewish and can't use electronics on the Sabbath FFS

!rant
I think that more than learning about CS, I learned how to cope with enormous amounts of frustration that comes with being a dev and I also felt great when I was being challenged with actual deadlines through exams, hackathons, assignments, practicals and tough professors.
Professionally, I think the great knowledge of fundamentals of CS helps a lot and it is just a great way to get your foot inside the door (for internship interviews and career opportunities) of a company and then show what you're made of when it comes to being a dev.
Also, I had the time of my life because I was around like-minded people who loved the same things and it was good to watch them suffer at first and then, watch them succeed at something that I was about to do.

What r types of programmers u need to win a hackathon?

Shout out to the teachers and mentors that encourage kids to program and take part in hackathons and events.

Our company often carry outs hackathons for customers and partners (for apps for our cloud system). One time they carried out an hackathon for us employees. My team won the price, a 40€ Amazon gift card 😄

Being a Dutch developer & student I'd love to seek new challenges and participate in coding events and Hackathons. Seeing as Devrant has so many amazing developers from The Netherlands around, any suggestions where I could go and find information about such events?

36 hours. In the first 2 Hackathons I ever participated. This includes the time I spent on eating free food, tea , dinner, mid-night snacks, tea, tea, morning snacks, lunch, evening snacks, tea, tea, dinner ........And Quizzes that I lost

Corporate hackathons are bullshit. I've swore them off. There is no way I'm going to be put in additional hours for so little gain ever again.

Companies have boatloads of money, and they think they can get away giving people $100 Amazon gift cards. SERIOUSLY? You pay for execs in millions of dollars for flapping their mouths.

Make it so that you pay out at least 20k+ to winners and give people something for participating - a nice 1k bonus.

You guys have enough money.

in other news, i'm in a group of like 5 devs out of a thousand who actually have something to show for this hacking project that's been going on for two weeks now

most "project" links lead to empty github repos, half assed repos, or cloned repo templates / empty / useless READMEs

wouldn't be surprised if i see a fork of bitcoin submitted soon

oh wait that's litecoin

but, fake it till you make right?

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

Friendly reminder for hackathons, a great idea is better than a great app.

I saw amazing creations, from a virtual reality rowing machine to a camera that read a Connect 4 game into a AWS server live.

Yet, the hack that won the popular vote was an app that would tell your friend, through texts, where you were when you're heading over to pick them up.

A simple concept to implement, but a great idea.

Story of a first-time hackathon.

So, I took part in the COVID-19 Global Hackathon.

Long story short, I got excited at OCR and just went with the most challenging challenge - digitizing forms with handwritten text and checkboxes, ones which say whether you have been in contact with someone who could have Coronavirus.

And, unsurprisingly, it didn't work within 4 days. I joined up with 2 people, who both left halfway through - one announced, one silently - and another guy joined, said he had something working and then dissapeared.

We never settled on a stack - we started with a local docker running Tesseract, then Google Cloud Vision, then we found Amazon Textract. None worked easily.

Timezone differences were annoying too. There was a 15-hour difference across our zones. I spent hours in the Slack channel waiting.

We didn't manage the deadline, and the people who set the challenge needed the solution withing 10 days, a deadline we also missed. We ended up with a basic-bitch Vue app to take pictures with mock Amazon S3 functionality, empty TDD in Python and also some OCR work.

tbh, that stuff would've worked if we had 4 weeks. I understand why everyone left.

I guess the lesson from this is not to be over-ambitious with hackathons. And not to over-estimate computers' detection abilities.

So I've been thinking about how to get people in my high school to join a team that I am creating for MLH. I also need to figure out how to plan and host the hackathon as well as fundraise for it. I'm trying to get all of this done be March of next year so that everything runs smoothly(hopefully). My school district is full or super rich kiddos so fundraising should be easy. Anyways do you guys have any tips for trying to get people into a team and organizing/fundraising for a hackathon?

Tell me if I'm wrong
I know android dev and the more I go deeper, the more i hate the way things are done. It felt like memorising something new everytime i had to get shit done. And if u stray even just a little u get a shitload of exceptions. My android devs were pretty much crying at the end of this 40hr hackathon(i was on backend).

At the end, i just don't like d way things are done, its just way too complicated and messy for my use case - hackathons and making things as a hobby.

So you could imagine when i started react native and saw all my problems fade away. I don't know what'll happen when i go deeper. But if you've had the good fortune of working with these things, do u think its a good switch? Will i face d same issues with react native as i do now? Thanks

Oh, I've pulled a lot of all-nighters. I love doing hackathons. I find myself most productive when I work on something in a single stretch. I have ADD that way. If I leave a project mid-way, that's probably the last time I'll be working on it; unless someone comes to me and reminds me about it.

Other than attending organized hackathons, I go on personal hackathons. When I'm in the mood to code something up in my free time, I just find some stupid, random idea to code and code it up overnight. (Oh, I have a very long list of projects that I can complete over the weekend)

Other times, I'll just be in the mood as I'm working on something and then lose track of time (and other bodily calls like hunger) as I finish it.

If my weekend looks very peaceful without any distractions, I put my hand in my project bowl and pull something up to finish it off over the weekend.

The hackathons I have been in have been great. The one negative experience was some guy that showed up, didn't code, and kept asking people who were clearly busy about writing some stock trading code. It is like he could not wait until the end of the event (2 hours).

Thoughts on hackathons?

Does anyone actually compete in online hackathons? Honestly it defeats the whole networking and socializing aspect and just seems like a way to fool developers into creating free products using company apis...

Anyone have any experience with organising hackathons from the very start? I'm part of the Google developer group for my city and am a co organizer with a friend. We're not planning on one this year but we would definitely like to organize one for next year. Could anyone give some tips on how I could perhaps finesse sponsors into participating? 😁

hackathons suck.

The most positive things about hackathons I can think of are the facts that they're are rarely mandatory and doesn't matter much to anyone other than the organisers or "winner" ...
On occasion swag or catering (if there's a bar) can kinda make up for it :)

Mostly on hackathons and dev related events.

The community can be so friendly. Even I learned some good stuff.

Good people, good times.

Hopelessly chasing prizing money from remote Hackathons on Devpost.com.

Can't really complain about hackathons, they've been great to me. Worked with new technology every time, so I've always taken massive positives every time.

I wished to not procrastinate
God gave me a life so busy I don't have time to.

(3 internship deadlines in 10 days, 2 colg project deadlines and 2 hackathons next week)

When u realise black stickers dnt look good on black body >_<

When people around u talk about Hackathons, winning them and all you do is submitting ur assignments and frustration of not enough getting teammates to participate is fucking irritating and demotivating!

What i think is... Participating and securing a rank in hackathons is much easier than organising it.

Is here anyone who really thinks that there is any benefit of participating in hackathons?
Acc. to me, hackathons doesn't makes a good developer but only a good resume(only if u win them)

There should be a dev equivalent to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

3 days when I had to complete documentation for an audit. I only returned to my room to shower and change clothes for the next day. That too I left at 8AM and returned at 09:30AM.
2 days when I had to complete setting up the office network over the weekend. Note that this was over a weekend.

And this is without counting the many hours I've spent semi-working at hackathons. I've gone up to 60 hours without sleep, coding the shit out of my brains.