The title of the blog post should be "How to run a Hackathon if your only objective is to trend on GitHub".
I've been to many hackathons and also organized a few, and this is one of the most soulless incarnations of a hackathon I've seen.
In my opinion on of the coolest things about a hackathon is the ability to live out your creativity and be free from perfectionsim to have a change of pace from your traditional day-job in software engineering, so we've also always tried to enable that when organizing. Eliminating that by providing preformulated ideas like this here proposes kills that at the root. They state that they do that in order to prevent everyone from picking the same idea, but there are good other measures to do that like having a scoring system that factors in creativity (and penalizing people working on the same idea).
In my experience this is the problem with a great many hackathons. I stopped attending many years ago when I realised the people who made the best presentations were the people who won, not the people with the best hack.
(not saying they’re all like this of course. But a lot were)
Could you please suggest good resources about running hackathons? We organized a few and will run a new one soon and there is a lot of room for improvements. Thanks!
It's a blogpost about marketing not engineering, and the submission will no doubt be used in the future as an example of "growth hacking" (i.e Trending on HN is an achievement)
Indeed. Seems like the title should be "how to run hackathons to get github activity".
And the "in 2024" part... A few ways this can be interpreted:
- How things are going to be different from prior years. First thing that came to mind... "AI tooling must feature a lot now?" Maybe this will be an article about what guidelines to have for use of ChatGPT? (or maybe that it's a non-issue)
- When it was written... seems to be what the author had in mind based on another comment.
I've been to many hackathons and also organized a few, and this is one of the most soulless incarnations of a hackathon I've seen.
In my opinion on of the coolest things about a hackathon is the ability to live out your creativity and be free from perfectionsim to have a change of pace from your traditional day-job in software engineering, so we've also always tried to enable that when organizing. Eliminating that by providing preformulated ideas like this here proposes kills that at the root. They state that they do that in order to prevent everyone from picking the same idea, but there are good other measures to do that like having a scoring system that factors in creativity (and penalizing people working on the same idea).