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Well I am going to a hack-a-thon competition tomorrow which is similar to a meetup in my opinion.

gamechangr 11y ago
Hack-a-thons are good, but definately not as good as a MeetUps. Hack-a-thons are kind of hit and miss. You get a stronger chance to make a good impression on two or three guys. MeetUps - you have the whole community which knows each other. You can for example say that you're interested in picking up contract work or pairing with anyone anytime. At a MeetUp, someone will say..."I know Dave is looking for a person to pair with as he's never trained anyone and he's just been promoted". That stuff is hard to come by at a Hack-a-thon and to be frank, great programers at a hack-a-thon have difficulty even finding small features for new dev's to develop. I remember my first hack-a-thon I worked with a great team, but I ended up working on the "About us" page, because I really couldn't contribute as much as I would have liked. Stay with it - MeetUps are ten times better for future employment than Hack-a-thons in my humble opinion. That's not to say that a Hack-a-thon couldn't be end up creating an opportunity, but the circle is soooo much smaller.
- mkwenhua 11y ago
  Yeah I went to a Javascript meetup and it was amazing. Unlike the ruby meetups that were mostly just bootcamp people, it was all industry professionals and people there because they love JS, and it worked out great. Also you're right I went to a open university Hackathon and just spent hours trying to get my team to build anything. I was building out a Node/socket.io api to work with both a rails Web app and an Android and these students didn't even know how to parse a json string in Java, and I kept on telling them that there is just a simple function for that. Anyways long story short after 12 hours they had noting working, and I was unable to finish the Android app in time. the weird thing is, they are all getting offers for entry level positions and these companies wont even consider me as a possibility.

Hack-a-thons are good, but definately not as good as a MeetUps. Hack-a-thons are kind of hit and miss. You get a stronger chance to make a good impression on two or three guys. MeetUps - you have the whole community which knows each other. You can for example say that you're interested in picking up contract work or pairing with anyone anytime. At a MeetUp, someone will say..."I know Dave is looking for a person to pair with as he's never trained anyone and he's just been promoted". That stuff is hard to come by at a Hack-a-thon and to be frank, great programers at a hack-a-thon have difficulty even finding small features for new dev's to develop. I remember my first hack-a-thon I worked with a great team, but I ended up working on the "About us" page, because I really couldn't contribute as much as I would have liked. Stay with it - MeetUps are ten times better for future employment than Hack-a-thons in my humble opinion. That's not to say that a Hack-a-thon couldn't be end up creating an opportunity, but the circle is soooo much smaller.

mkwenhua 11y ago
Yeah I went to a Javascript meetup and it was amazing. Unlike the ruby meetups that were mostly just bootcamp people, it was all industry professionals and people there because they love JS, and it worked out great. Also you're right I went to a open university Hackathon and just spent hours trying to get my team to build anything. I was building out a Node/socket.io api to work with both a rails Web app and an Android and these students didn't even know how to parse a json string in Java, and I kept on telling them that there is just a simple function for that. Anyways long story short after 12 hours they had noting working, and I was unable to finish the Android app in time. the weird thing is, they are all getting offers for entry level positions and these companies wont even consider me as a possibility.