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The worst thing I feel about hackathon is that it instills a bad culture of software development into young programmers. People spend a weekend writing crappy c
by octref 11y ago
The worst thing I feel about hackathon is that it instills a bad culture of software development into young programmers. People spend a weekend writing crappy code and wiring APIs together, expecting to get money and fame. In the real world, we don't need more crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks. We need more solid, performant, well-designed apps. Sadly, none of these points are priorities at hackathons. We also need more programmers with empathy, perseverance, dedication, and ability to work on large projects without burning themselves out physically and mentally. Hackathon doesn't seem to cultivate these traits either. I hope instead of going to hackathons, more people can try building semester-long, meaningful projects and take time to maintain them, or try contributing to open source software.
- sotojuan 11y agoHackathons cultivate the opposite of "empathy, perseverance, dedication, and ability to work on large projects". They make people hypercompetitive and unwilling to collaborate or help just so they can get their `sponsor_api` mixed with `sponsor_api` app done. I'm making a big generalization but IMO sponsored hackathons cultivate some of the worst aspects of our culture.
- zwetan 11y agoand worst, the sale pitch have more value, than the code written to build the app
- reitanqild 11y agoSo, basically you violently agree? ;-)
- lmm 11y agoI think this kind of "worse is better" is actually a very valuable thing to learn. These "crude and fragile apps which leverage most of its work to frameworks" provide a lot of value to people, which is ultimately a lot more important than engineering pride.
- collyw 11y agoIn what way is it more important? I thought having stable maintaniable applications is pretty useful thing to try to achieve.
- S4M 11y agoSeems both are complimentary. Hackathons are for prototyping, building stable maintainable applications is for the long term.
- lmm 11y agoMy empirical experience is that programmers err too much on the side of doing things right. Most code has a relatively short lifetime; a lot of code simply won't be maintained much, because the first version is used to test a business assumption that often turns out to be false. Stability and maintainability are useful, but rarely as useful as being fast to market.
- collyw 11y agoFrom the technical debt involved in the last two projects I have inherited, I would disagree.
- georgehotelling 11y agoI'm having trouble finding any numbers that suggest greenfield development is more common than maintenance development. My own experience is that most of my work is done on existing code bases, and I am more productive when the coders before me spent the extra time to make sure the code is adaptable to new situations. Can you point to some empirical evidence to the contrary? Edit: I had some more thoughts about this, specifically that there is a survivorship bias to legacy code. Not all projects survive, but when they do that code can live a long life of maintenance. If you are involved in the startup world, it may make more sense to get it done quick & dirty in order to get funding than to write "good" code. That might explain the disparity of our experiences.
- 11y ago