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Back end developers on hackathons are not needed

58 points by skibish 5y ago

mcguire 5y ago
"Backend developers on hackathons are not needed" It's a good thing those horrible old days of "ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the execution that matters" are long, long gone.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Now both the idea and the execution do not matter. It's all about cornering markets and becoming monopolists of a tiny corner.
paxys 5y ago
*For one very narrow definition of Hackathon Seems like the author needs to attend Hackathons where the sole purpose isn't to sell a SaaS prototype to investors and clients. I have been to enough of them where no one cares how fancy the CSS styling on the page looks. Or even that there's a GUI at all. One time the winner wrote a CLI script. I routinely demo API calls using Postman.
- hobofan 5y ago
  Yeah, I've co-organized and attended multiple hackathons, and one of our organization principles is "code is key", to combat powerpoint-only submissions. That means that there is a code-screening after the submission deadline that ensures that what was demoed was also implemented, and also gives some points in the overall scoring based on execution. We have seen submissions that include a fully-fleged backend including tests, as well as completely faked demos (which were easy to pick up, as what they promised was too far removed from reality).
kart23 5y ago
Depends on your idea. For example, if you're actually building a demo that requires collaborative features that others can try in real-time, backend can add a lot to the working and cool factor. Imagine you're making a skribbl.io clone, you can't just fake other user's live inputs.
dexwiz 5y ago
Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  I won a hackathon once with PowerPoint mock-ups (read: a slide deck). The term “hackathon” means nothing anymore. They’re just pitch competitions anymore.
- heyparkerj 5y ago
  My organization's most recent hack day was won by the UX team signing up for a free demo of a chat bot service and demoing it - not a single line of code. We haven't had one since, nor do we use chat bots anywhere in our org a few years later.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    How could that win? Others are saying slides were presented. Demoing a SaaS chat bot is nothing!
    - dexwiz 5y ago
      Hackathons are not about tech, they are about business value now. They are a chance for individual contributors or low level managers to present business ideas to their bosses. Bosses don’t really care about tech.
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      I can tell you this exact thing happened at my company's hackathon and it finished pretty close to a win. It was the Alexa prompt driven chatbot. Not a single line of code was written.
treeman79 5y ago
As a backend developer. This is correct. I’ve seen teams waste months building a perfect system that doesn’t do what’s needed. Building a clickable demo that fakes is literally 1000 times better. When the feedback comes in you can change it almost in real time. Once everyone is happy with how the UX and all that work then someone can build the actual requirements. Which will look nothing like the original idea.
repomies69 5y ago
This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.
- detaro 5y ago
  Yes, it's sad to see how those have taken over the term so much
- Kaze404 5y ago
  I got baited into going to one of those once. I was promised the prospect of spending a dozen hours with friends building something cool, but halfway through I realized we were just doing free labor for one of Latin America's biggest banks and just left. I'm still longing for events where my friends and I can gather to build something cool, and game jams are the closest I ever got to that.
  - magicink81 5y ago
    +1 had a fun Node Knockout experience many years ago making a game with 3 friends. We had a game artist / sound designer, and two engineers with chops on the front-end and back-end.
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      Node knockout and rails rumble before that. :) In which the Judges have to actually try out the submission instead of listening to people go through a slide deck on a video.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I think most of the creative energy of building things quickly rightly goes into game jams because they offer the potential of UX creativity, rapid iteration and a joyous product at the end. Coding up a web app can be fun but the output product is almost always business-y and I'd much rather play a dozen games in order to vote, than blank-slate setup a bunch of web apps.
skulk 5y ago
If anyone's looking to participate in a large (on the order of 100 participants or more) hackathon in the near future, this advice is 100% on the money. No matter how demonstrably useful your product is, something with better UX will win 9 times out of 10, even if the idea behind the good UX is inherently flawed and the application isn't even functional beyond the wireframe level (no one will fuzz test it). I came away from this thinking hackathons were a complete and total waste of time, but at the same time while I've not once won a prize at a hackathon despite participating in several, I have my current job because of connections I gained during one.
MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
Point taken, but jeez, Hackathons are supposed to be participatory/inclusive events. Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks. Full disclosure I am running a hackathon at my company this very week and am nervous about participation and this post made me anxious lol.
- some_furry 5y ago
  "Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks." I agree, but business goals supersede our feelings.
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
Hackathons are literally the opposite. You are there to deliver something that works, looking pretty is 30 yards down the line of concerns,
88913527 5y ago
This is often true in professional settings. "Just build the UI for this, and the API team will catch up". I object-- give me an OpenAPI spec that we agree upon in advance. Front-end today involves building up a lot of in-memory data structures, and I haven't built something useful if the JSON shape I attempt giving you, is not what the backend team is expecting.
aejnsn 5y ago
This is true, and part of a larger problem where product managers and BAs come in and try to REUSE components conceived in a hackathon. I hope I never have to see that again.
jdavis703 5y ago
At least for “day job” hackathons this seems counterproductive. A big part of winning support to productionize is proving to the naysayers that an implementation is feasible. For example, at my current job folks are biased to complex, high-risk AI/ML approaches… Instead of figuring out an imperative solution, senior folks tend to just discard it. A hackathon is a great way to short-circuit artificial technical road blocks and win support from product and business teams to start with a simple solution.
mrkentutbabi 5y ago
Actually, you don't need frontend devs as well. Just use UX designer + Figma.
ramoz 5y ago
There is a professional form of hackathons, often found in procurement opportunities. Participating teams/companies are evaluated via a technical challenge. While not the best way to evaluate for $X-XXXM efforts, they certainly provide opportunity to showcase. Ive had multiple successes here. Platform/infra and backend are the most critical parts to get right, and come automated with. I can staff any team of junior devs enabled by tools like react to quickly implement user interfaces beyond what competitors showcase; but only due to the backbone.
duxup 5y ago
>If you were able to show the idea, it looks sexy and everybody is nodding — you won. Is this a "hackathon" or just a "pitchathon"? I'm ok with the idea of a "pitchathon" but don't call it a Hackathon...
jmfldn 5y ago
This exact thing happened to me. I was the backend guy on a winning hackathon team and decided it was pointless to build a real server for the proposed idea. It was essentially a single page app, v nicely designed etc, kind of a half-baked concept but kind of fine. Definitely aligned with the business. It won with the entire backend being mocked. It didn't really matter if there there was actual business logic underneath. I just advised on API design and made sure the idea hung together technically speaking. It beat some much cooler, technically innovative concepts. It made me not want to participate in another hackathon though. All the fun, nerdiness and actual hacking were replaced by basically building a sensible product demo.
devmor 5y ago
OP is the kind of person that messages his highschool friends on Facebook talking about how he has an app he designed that he just needs a developer for and it's "like 90% done", but when you ask him for his part of the work he sends you a PSD with the UI design.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  This isn't what the post of talking about. The post is talking about the fact that hackathons are no longer judged by their technical merits. that the OP doesn't understand the value of backend developers in real world is not something that I can see from the post.
yupper32 5y ago
> The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room. No, that's a Startup Weekend-type event: https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend. They rightfully don't call themselves hackathons. A hackathon should be related to software development, not entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with either, but labels matter.
- siva7 5y ago
  The term hackathon nowadays is almost never related to software development. You can win most "hackathons" with a powerpoint slide, doing actual programming won't win you a price.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Yeah, it shouldn't be this way but it is. Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, the important thing is to recognize when a "hackathon" is actually a "pitchathon" (usually) and to not waste effort doing things that will go unappreciated at a pitchathon (namely, hacking).
    - some_furry 5y ago
      > Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, The only winning move is not to play. Or more specifically, the only winning move is to exploit these pitchathons to meet people with complementary skills ("backend dev? meet UI engineer") and then collectively run the hell away from the event with your expanded network. Then go do a real hackathon with interested parties, and not business pitches.
      - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
        > The only winning move is not to play It has infact come to this. A lot of people whom I met at hackathons don't participate anymore and it took me a while to realise that this was because hackathons aren't what they used to be.
sillyquiet 5y ago
Ugh, not to get on a grumpy-old-man tangent, but I recall when 'hacking' and 'hackathon' had fairly specific and nerdy meanings, and not 'let's try to knock something up we could do in Figma or another wireframe tool to sell to investors'
mrweasel 5y ago
That's a little depressing. The hackathons around here are just people getting together to work on what ever they feel like. There's no jury, no contest, just hacking on fun little projects, helping others. The observation might be correct in the circle where to author travels, but it does remind me of the dotcom days. You always had this guy: The Idea Guy. He couldn't actually do anything. He just had "ideas", and others just had to write code to make it work. The important part is that the ideas where the thing that matters, coding was something anyone could do... except the idea guy, apparently (much too busy I guess). The plan was always the same thing, the idea guy would come up with business ideas, and a team would code them up, while the idea guy sat in his office, dreaming up the next big product. Back then those people where basically a joke, but now I guess they're important.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Idea guys always thought they were important. One in a hundred actually is -- but not because of the ideas.
oauea 5y ago
Your hackathon results should not "look sexy". If that's what you're focusing on, you're going to the wrong hackathons.
Hippocrates 5y ago
I’ve personally seen hackathons won by backend-ish things, such as a recommendation engine and a command line tool. The author’s idea of a hackathon is Shark Tank. There’s more to hackathons (execution) than the idea and visual at the end.
turtlebits 5y ago
Sounds like these are not Hackathons but MVP-athons.
woodruffw 5y ago
Let's cut out the middleman entirely and say that Hackathons, as such, aren't needed ;)
_benj 5y ago
I guess it depends on the type of hackathon and project. Not to long ago I participated in a hackathon in which we make a super simple video game. Even though the majority of the work was making the game, the 2 hours used in making the scrappiest ever node.js/express server for arcade-style high scores was the most popular feature by far. So, in that case, being a scrappy backend proved to be very valuable. Like 3 hours some people realized that they could just POST whatever to the server and the high scores where pointless, but nonetheless, that small backend (20 lines?) proved a very important point
d357r0y3r 5y ago
The next logical extension of this is: "Front End Developers on Hackathons Are Not needed." After that, it's "UI/UX Prototype Designers on Hackathons Are Not Needed." If you want to turn your Hackathon into a Pitchathon, then okay, yes, you don't need any developers or designers of any type, you just need someone with an idea who can communicate that idea. But, that's not really the same thing, is it?
sbarre 5y ago
We've restarted doing 2-day hackathons at my work, and in the spirit of being as inclusive as possible for all team members, we don't require teams to submit code at the end. Some still do though, but in the end we want teams to play to their individual strengths and deliver anything they want that fits the theme. We do pick themes that are relevant to the business, but there are no other requirements, and we do it over 2 days during working hours (and even provide Doordash and Starbucks cards to the teams for meals and coffee), so there's no "free labour" shenanigans or weekend work. So far it has been a great success, and I believe we've had much higher participation than if we had stuck to the more traditional definition of a hackathon.
- ketzo 5y ago
  The working hours thing alone is awesome -- it sends a signal that "this is a good and valuable thing that you're doing, even if no software for our business comes out of it"
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Yep, and let me tell you it took negotiation with leadership to give so many people 2 days away from working on "deliverables" but in the end everyone was convinced that the team building and inspirational value was worth it.
    - orwin 5y ago
      My team managed to negociate half a day of internal presentation/keynote/formation each friday with the management and all the team (with one monitoring production and the whole team on call still). I thought at first it was interesting but without added value, i was wrong. Not only the teambuilding, but also understanding why your coworker work like they do, it help a lot. We also got a lot of hindsight on why stuff are build the way they are, why we have sometime /25, sometime /24 subnets, all historical debt origin, i think this is a net benefit for the business.
      - sbarre 5y ago
71a54xd 5y ago
Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience. The coolest thing I ever saw built at a hackathon in boston was a fellow NU student who built a filesystem that completely operated within network traffic flowing between a number of network switches. Totally novel, not fake tech backing a half-baked "business" idea with the IBM watson API. I stopped going to hackathons after one kid at Hack the North U Waterloo literally tore a muscle in his eye from looking at a screen too long...
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  > Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience. I agree. After a couple, the sheen wore off because a majority of the people there either attend hackathons all the time, trying to "win", and fork existing projects with slight variations everytime, or are unable to do anything at all. Wish there were some kind of rules about not using existing personal repo's.
mbostleman 5y ago
Of course not, assuming the goal is demo UX via UI behavior, it's far more expedient to mock backend dependencies on the front end. Is this supposed to be controversial?
siva7 5y ago
I participiated once in a corporate sponsored hackathon and won with a slide show. Those hackathons have nowadays nothing to do with software development and i will never again participate in that. They are almost always about adding business value and some startup crap.
fhood 5y ago
I guess I don't disagree, but not sure I understand the point if all you need is one guy with a copy of illustrator/photoshop/whatever?
ww520 5y ago
Hackathons are jokes. I was once lured to one for building phone apps. The winning entry was a team with a PowerPoint. The judges were VC. They’re just fishing for ideas to fund. A great waste of time.
999900000999 5y ago
The last so-called hackathon I went to involved a bunch of idea guys sitting in a room talking about how cool their ideas were. One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough. Like I did it for free man, can you at least try to say thank you. I will say I do enjoy game jams, at least then we have something fun to play. I have no interest in prototyping an app for someone else to get rich.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  > One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough. Idea guys in a nutshell.
  - tharne 5y ago
    At this point in my life whether it be at work or a social event, the minute someone describes themselves as an "idea guy", I run like hell. There is no red flag like the "idea guy".
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
This is true but this is a disgrace to the whole idea of a hackathon and goes against the very spirit. Business suit people should stop appropriating words from the tech space: what passes for a hackathon submission these days is a PowerPoint presentation with realistic click points. It's still a "deck" which is what they've always been doing
zemo 5y ago
this assumes a lot about what type of hackathon you're going to and why you're going to a hackathon. If you're going to a hackathon that's a judged competition with prizes for the specific purposes of trying to win a prize, this is accurate, but what you're really doing when you attend hackathons like that with those goals is working for the hackathon organizer without a contract, hoping that you'll get paid, knowing that most of you won't. That's not play, that's work. Is that worth it? Maybe. If it's your only opportunity to potentially get paid or you would have nothing to do otherwise or you're really motivated by competition (and not learning/fun/socialization), sure, that can be worth it. If you're going to a hackathon with the intention of learning/fun/socialization this post is terrible advice. I went to hackathons for years. I never went with the intention of winning. I always enjoyed myself and always got what I wanted out of it. I've never placed first in a hackathon, but I met several friends at hackathons that I am still friends with years later, learned many technologies through attending hackathons, built lots of fun little projects that I'm proud of, and met my wife at a hackathon. And to all those people saying "that's not really a hackathon", that ship sailed long ago.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Just skip everyone except an invision prototyper and a LOB. Done ! Reductive and missing the point of Hackathons, and simply a poor shark tank style pitch-a-thon.
hellojesus 5y ago
Seems the concensus is that front end is the most imperative thing out of the gate. Seems true in my non hackathon side project, of which I'm the solo dev. Can anyone please recommend a good front end framework/tool for a backend dev? I've been working on a project for awhile and the sequence has been: 1. Get requirements 2. Make excellent back end (and clarify functionality, edge cases along the way) 3. Build non sexy front end that works functionally 4. Get complaints front end is not sexy even though it can do very sexy things through the back end 5. Requirements change massively and now I have to tear down and repeat 1-4 with ever-increasing comments about it not being sexy. Right now everything is django templates + bootstrap + javascript/jquery. It works but is not sexy.
- game_the0ry 5y ago
  > Can anyone please recommend a good front end framework/tool for a backend dev? Next.js + deploy to Vercel - great dev experience.
- dzonga 5y ago
  I would recommend mithril.js - simple comes with batteries included. and easy to start with, just include it in the script tag. with mithril you will find it easier to transition to the big boys - react, vue, etc. if you wanna start with the big boys, go with svelte though ecosystem is kinda small but the templates etc it's just writing html you're used to. react if you want something ergonomic and easy to find help with - well that is before the shit called hooks
game_the0ry 5y ago
Back end developers are not needed in general. (Ducks from all the rotten vegetables being thrown at me) It was a joke, everyone! (I am a front end developer and I like teasing back end folks)
bborud 5y ago
Why would you want to go to that kind of event anyway? I've been to lord knows how many events fitting this description and I can remember exactly zero products or startups coming out of this.
_57jb 5y ago
Yeah, if you prescribe to the smoke and mirrors style. Sometimes the logic or capabilities of technology have to be explained at a cursory level just to provide some grounding. I made the same mistake as OP thinking I could dazzle my "investors". It was the early days of VR before controllers existed and I built a few peripherals to compensate for an interactive training environment (savings of 2MM travel/training etc). Demo was a hit, numbers were a hit, they started asking about tech, adoption, viability...I believed in VR but they needed to believe it was going to be real based on more than my enthusiasm. Shelved only to be revived five years later with someone else running it following a trail that had been clearly blazed by competition. I was happy for them but always wished I had been given a chance to take that shot before the wave hit. I just lacked the credentials and I was never clever enough to be a "baffle with bullshit" person. Backend people even just to say: "I am the authority and everything said here is possible. I will show you if you are seriously interested in the mechanics"
deleted 5y ago
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karmakaze 5y ago
Title should be: Backend Developers Are Not Needed... to win most 'Hackathons' I can agree with this, as much as I dislike the trend as the 'hack'ing isn't on the system being prototyped, but rather the system of judging the event.
clem 5y ago
When did hackathons become about "winning"? I thought it was a chance to test out new solutions that your day-to-day job wouldn't necessarily give you the opportunity to explore.
spacemanmatt 5y ago
I don't see the point of starting an app without reactive OAUTH2, SQL, and HTTP support ready to use. It strains me to understand what tools people bring to hackathons in a usable form.
tlhunter 5y ago
I've won hackathons building real time multiplayer games. In those cases it was the backend that set it apart from the competition.

58 points by skibish 5y ago

"Backend developers on hackathons are not needed" It's a good thing those horrible old days of "ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the execution that matters" are long, long gone.

goodpoint 5y ago
Now both the idea and the execution do not matter. It's all about cornering markets and becoming monopolists of a tiny corner.

paxys 5y ago

*For one very narrow definition of Hackathon Seems like the author needs to attend Hackathons where the sole purpose isn't to sell a SaaS prototype to investors and clients. I have been to enough of them where no one cares how fancy the CSS styling on the page looks. Or even that there's a GUI at all. One time the winner wrote a CLI script. I routinely demo API calls using Postman.

hobofan 5y ago
Yeah, I've co-organized and attended multiple hackathons, and one of our organization principles is "code is key", to combat powerpoint-only submissions. That means that there is a code-screening after the submission deadline that ensures that what was demoed was also implemented, and also gives some points in the overall scoring based on execution. We have seen submissions that include a fully-fleged backend including tests, as well as completely faked demos (which were easy to pick up, as what they promised was too far removed from reality).

kart23 5y ago

Depends on your idea. For example, if you're actually building a demo that requires collaborative features that others can try in real-time, backend can add a lot to the working and cool factor. Imagine you're making a skribbl.io clone, you can't just fake other user's live inputs.

dexwiz 5y ago

Sad but true. Hackdays should be called Sketchdays. Judging is often very short, and can be easily constrained to happy path. My experience as a developer is that UI work is worth way more than backend for winning a hackday. Work is so UI skewed, that it's probably better to do an Invision mockup.

wayoutthere 5y ago
I won a hackathon once with PowerPoint mock-ups (read: a slide deck). The term “hackathon” means nothing anymore. They’re just pitch competitions anymore.
heyparkerj 5y ago
My organization's most recent hack day was won by the UX team signing up for a free demo of a chat bot service and demoing it - not a single line of code. We haven't had one since, nor do we use chat bots anywhere in our org a few years later.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  How could that win? Others are saying slides were presented. Demoing a SaaS chat bot is nothing!
  - dexwiz 5y ago
    Hackathons are not about tech, they are about business value now. They are a chance for individual contributors or low level managers to present business ideas to their bosses. Bosses don’t really care about tech.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    I can tell you this exact thing happened at my company's hackathon and it finished pretty close to a win. It was the Alexa prompt driven chatbot. Not a single line of code was written.

treeman79 5y ago

As a backend developer. This is correct. I’ve seen teams waste months building a perfect system that doesn’t do what’s needed. Building a clickable demo that fakes is literally 1000 times better. When the feedback comes in you can change it almost in real time. Once everyone is happy with how the UX and all that work then someone can build the actual requirements. Which will look nothing like the original idea.

repomies69 5y ago

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

detaro 5y ago
Yes, it's sad to see how those have taken over the term so much
Kaze404 5y ago
I got baited into going to one of those once. I was promised the prospect of spending a dozen hours with friends building something cool, but halfway through I realized we were just doing free labor for one of Latin America's biggest banks and just left. I'm still longing for events where my friends and I can gather to build something cool, and game jams are the closest I ever got to that.
- magicink81 5y ago
  +1 had a fun Node Knockout experience many years ago making a game with 3 friends. We had a game artist / sound designer, and two engineers with chops on the front-end and back-end.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    Node knockout and rails rumble before that. :) In which the Judges have to actually try out the submission instead of listening to people go through a slide deck on a video.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I think most of the creative energy of building things quickly rightly goes into game jams because they offer the potential of UX creativity, rapid iteration and a joyous product at the end. Coding up a web app can be fun but the output product is almost always business-y and I'd much rather play a dozen games in order to vote, than blank-slate setup a bunch of web apps.

skulk 5y ago

If anyone's looking to participate in a large (on the order of 100 participants or more) hackathon in the near future, this advice is 100% on the money. No matter how demonstrably useful your product is, something with better UX will win 9 times out of 10, even if the idea behind the good UX is inherently flawed and the application isn't even functional beyond the wireframe level (no one will fuzz test it). I came away from this thinking hackathons were a complete and total waste of time, but at the same time while I've not once won a prize at a hackathon despite participating in several, I have my current job because of connections I gained during one.

MaxfordAndSons 5y ago

Point taken, but jeez, Hackathons are supposed to be participatory/inclusive events. Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks. Full disclosure I am running a hackathon at my company this very week and am nervous about participation and this post made me anxious lol.

some_furry 5y ago
"Feels a bit harsh and counter-productive to just tell back end devs to kick rocks." I agree, but business goals supersede our feelings.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

Hackathons are literally the opposite. You are there to deliver something that works, looking pretty is 30 yards down the line of concerns,

88913527 5y ago

This is often true in professional settings. "Just build the UI for this, and the API team will catch up". I object-- give me an OpenAPI spec that we agree upon in advance. Front-end today involves building up a lot of in-memory data structures, and I haven't built something useful if the JSON shape I attempt giving you, is not what the backend team is expecting.

aejnsn 5y ago

This is true, and part of a larger problem where product managers and BAs come in and try to REUSE components conceived in a hackathon. I hope I never have to see that again.

jdavis703 5y ago

At least for “day job” hackathons this seems counterproductive. A big part of winning support to productionize is proving to the naysayers that an implementation is feasible. For example, at my current job folks are biased to complex, high-risk AI/ML approaches… Instead of figuring out an imperative solution, senior folks tend to just discard it. A hackathon is a great way to short-circuit artificial technical road blocks and win support from product and business teams to start with a simple solution.

mrkentutbabi 5y ago

Actually, you don't need frontend devs as well. Just use UX designer + Figma.

ramoz 5y ago

There is a professional form of hackathons, often found in procurement opportunities. Participating teams/companies are evaluated via a technical challenge. While not the best way to evaluate for $X-XXXM efforts, they certainly provide opportunity to showcase. Ive had multiple successes here. Platform/infra and backend are the most critical parts to get right, and come automated with. I can staff any team of junior devs enabled by tools like react to quickly implement user interfaces beyond what competitors showcase; but only due to the backbone.

duxup 5y ago

>If you were able to show the idea, it looks sexy and everybody is nodding — you won. Is this a "hackathon" or just a "pitchathon"? I'm ok with the idea of a "pitchathon" but don't call it a Hackathon...

jmfldn 5y ago

This exact thing happened to me. I was the backend guy on a winning hackathon team and decided it was pointless to build a real server for the proposed idea. It was essentially a single page app, v nicely designed etc, kind of a half-baked concept but kind of fine. Definitely aligned with the business. It won with the entire backend being mocked. It didn't really matter if there there was actual business logic underneath. I just advised on API design and made sure the idea hung together technically speaking. It beat some much cooler, technically innovative concepts. It made me not want to participate in another hackathon though. All the fun, nerdiness and actual hacking were replaced by basically building a sensible product demo.

devmor 5y ago

OP is the kind of person that messages his highschool friends on Facebook talking about how he has an app he designed that he just needs a developer for and it's "like 90% done", but when you ask him for his part of the work he sends you a PSD with the UI design.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
This isn't what the post of talking about. The post is talking about the fact that hackathons are no longer judged by their technical merits. that the OP doesn't understand the value of backend developers in real world is not something that I can see from the post.

yupper32 5y ago

> The main goal of the startup hackathons (or any other) is to validate the idea in a limited time that the product you build is needed by the people in the room. No, that's a Startup Weekend-type event: https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend. They rightfully don't call themselves hackathons. A hackathon should be related to software development, not entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with either, but labels matter.

siva7 5y ago
The term hackathon nowadays is almost never related to software development. You can win most "hackathons" with a powerpoint slide, doing actual programming won't win you a price.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Yeah, it shouldn't be this way but it is. Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, the important thing is to recognize when a "hackathon" is actually a "pitchathon" (usually) and to not waste effort doing things that will go unappreciated at a pitchathon (namely, hacking).
  - some_furry 5y ago
    > Unless we figure out how to reclaim the term, The only winning move is not to play. Or more specifically, the only winning move is to exploit these pitchathons to meet people with complementary skills ("backend dev? meet UI engineer") and then collectively run the hell away from the event with your expanded network. Then go do a real hackathon with interested parties, and not business pitches.
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      > The only winning move is not to play It has infact come to this. A lot of people whom I met at hackathons don't participate anymore and it took me a while to realise that this was because hackathons aren't what they used to be.

sillyquiet 5y ago

Ugh, not to get on a grumpy-old-man tangent, but I recall when 'hacking' and 'hackathon' had fairly specific and nerdy meanings, and not 'let's try to knock something up we could do in Figma or another wireframe tool to sell to investors'

mrweasel 5y ago

That's a little depressing. The hackathons around here are just people getting together to work on what ever they feel like. There's no jury, no contest, just hacking on fun little projects, helping others. The observation might be correct in the circle where to author travels, but it does remind me of the dotcom days. You always had this guy: The Idea Guy. He couldn't actually do anything. He just had "ideas", and others just had to write code to make it work. The important part is that the ideas where the thing that matters, coding was something anyone could do... except the idea guy, apparently (much too busy I guess). The plan was always the same thing, the idea guy would come up with business ideas, and a team would code them up, while the idea guy sat in his office, dreaming up the next big product. Back then those people where basically a joke, but now I guess they're important.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Idea guys always thought they were important. One in a hundred actually is -- but not because of the ideas.

oauea 5y ago

Your hackathon results should not "look sexy". If that's what you're focusing on, you're going to the wrong hackathons.

Hippocrates 5y ago

I’ve personally seen hackathons won by backend-ish things, such as a recommendation engine and a command line tool. The author’s idea of a hackathon is Shark Tank. There’s more to hackathons (execution) than the idea and visual at the end.

turtlebits 5y ago

Sounds like these are not Hackathons but MVP-athons.

woodruffw 5y ago

Let's cut out the middleman entirely and say that Hackathons, as such, aren't needed ;)

_benj 5y ago

I guess it depends on the type of hackathon and project. Not to long ago I participated in a hackathon in which we make a super simple video game. Even though the majority of the work was making the game, the 2 hours used in making the scrappiest ever node.js/express server for arcade-style high scores was the most popular feature by far. So, in that case, being a scrappy backend proved to be very valuable. Like 3 hours some people realized that they could just POST whatever to the server and the high scores where pointless, but nonetheless, that small backend (20 lines?) proved a very important point

d357r0y3r 5y ago

The next logical extension of this is: "Front End Developers on Hackathons Are Not needed." After that, it's "UI/UX Prototype Designers on Hackathons Are Not Needed." If you want to turn your Hackathon into a Pitchathon, then okay, yes, you don't need any developers or designers of any type, you just need someone with an idea who can communicate that idea. But, that's not really the same thing, is it?

sbarre 5y ago

We've restarted doing 2-day hackathons at my work, and in the spirit of being as inclusive as possible for all team members, we don't require teams to submit code at the end. Some still do though, but in the end we want teams to play to their individual strengths and deliver anything they want that fits the theme. We do pick themes that are relevant to the business, but there are no other requirements, and we do it over 2 days during working hours (and even provide Doordash and Starbucks cards to the teams for meals and coffee), so there's no "free labour" shenanigans or weekend work. So far it has been a great success, and I believe we've had much higher participation than if we had stuck to the more traditional definition of a hackathon.

ketzo 5y ago
The working hours thing alone is awesome -- it sends a signal that "this is a good and valuable thing that you're doing, even if no software for our business comes out of it"
- sbarre 5y ago
  Yep, and let me tell you it took negotiation with leadership to give so many people 2 days away from working on "deliverables" but in the end everyone was convinced that the team building and inspirational value was worth it.
  - orwin 5y ago
    My team managed to negociate half a day of internal presentation/keynote/formation each friday with the management and all the team (with one monitoring production and the whole team on call still). I thought at first it was interesting but without added value, i was wrong. Not only the teambuilding, but also understanding why your coworker work like they do, it help a lot. We also got a lot of hindsight on why stuff are build the way they are, why we have sometime /25, sometime /24 subnets, all historical debt origin, i think this is a net benefit for the business.
    - sbarre 5y ago

71a54xd 5y ago

Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience. The coolest thing I ever saw built at a hackathon in boston was a fellow NU student who built a filesystem that completely operated within network traffic flowing between a number of network switches. Totally novel, not fake tech backing a half-baked "business" idea with the IBM watson API. I stopped going to hackathons after one kid at Hack the North U Waterloo literally tore a muscle in his eye from looking at a screen too long...

reducesuffering 5y ago
> Most people who go to hackathons have tons of boilerplate already put together, at least in my experience. I agree. After a couple, the sheen wore off because a majority of the people there either attend hackathons all the time, trying to "win", and fork existing projects with slight variations everytime, or are unable to do anything at all. Wish there were some kind of rules about not using existing personal repo's.

mbostleman 5y ago

Of course not, assuming the goal is demo UX via UI behavior, it's far more expedient to mock backend dependencies on the front end. Is this supposed to be controversial?

siva7 5y ago

I participiated once in a corporate sponsored hackathon and won with a slide show. Those hackathons have nowadays nothing to do with software development and i will never again participate in that. They are almost always about adding business value and some startup crap.

fhood 5y ago

I guess I don't disagree, but not sure I understand the point if all you need is one guy with a copy of illustrator/photoshop/whatever?

ww520 5y ago

Hackathons are jokes. I was once lured to one for building phone apps. The winning entry was a team with a PowerPoint. The judges were VC. They’re just fishing for ideas to fund. A great waste of time.

999900000999 5y ago

The last so-called hackathon I went to involved a bunch of idea guys sitting in a room talking about how cool their ideas were. One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough. Like I did it for free man, can you at least try to say thank you. I will say I do enjoy game jams, at least then we have something fun to play. I have no interest in prototyping an app for someone else to get rich.

jjoonathan 5y ago
> One of these assholes had me make a prototype for him, he quickly dismissed it as not good enough. Idea guys in a nutshell.
- tharne 5y ago
  At this point in my life whether it be at work or a social event, the minute someone describes themselves as an "idea guy", I run like hell. There is no red flag like the "idea guy".

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

This is true but this is a disgrace to the whole idea of a hackathon and goes against the very spirit. Business suit people should stop appropriating words from the tech space: what passes for a hackathon submission these days is a PowerPoint presentation with realistic click points. It's still a "deck" which is what they've always been doing

zemo 5y ago

this assumes a lot about what type of hackathon you're going to and why you're going to a hackathon. If you're going to a hackathon that's a judged competition with prizes for the specific purposes of trying to win a prize, this is accurate, but what you're really doing when you attend hackathons like that with those goals is working for the hackathon organizer without a contract, hoping that you'll get paid, knowing that most of you won't. That's not play, that's work. Is that worth it? Maybe. If it's your only opportunity to potentially get paid or you would have nothing to do otherwise or you're really motivated by competition (and not learning/fun/socialization), sure, that can be worth it. If you're going to a hackathon with the intention of learning/fun/socialization this post is terrible advice. I went to hackathons for years. I never went with the intention of winning. I always enjoyed myself and always got what I wanted out of it. I've never placed first in a hackathon, but I met several friends at hackathons that I am still friends with years later, learned many technologies through attending hackathons, built lots of fun little projects that I'm proud of, and met my wife at a hackathon. And to all those people saying "that's not really a hackathon", that ship sailed long ago.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Just skip everyone except an invision prototyper and a LOB. Done ! Reductive and missing the point of Hackathons, and simply a poor shark tank style pitch-a-thon.

hellojesus 5y ago

Seems the concensus is that front end is the most imperative thing out of the gate. Seems true in my non hackathon side project, of which I'm the solo dev. Can anyone please recommend a good front end framework/tool for a backend dev? I've been working on a project for awhile and the sequence has been: 1. Get requirements 2. Make excellent back end (and clarify functionality, edge cases along the way) 3. Build non sexy front end that works functionally 4. Get complaints front end is not sexy even though it can do very sexy things through the back end 5. Requirements change massively and now I have to tear down and repeat 1-4 with ever-increasing comments about it not being sexy. Right now everything is django templates + bootstrap + javascript/jquery. It works but is not sexy.

game_the0ry 5y ago
> Can anyone please recommend a good front end framework/tool for a backend dev? Next.js + deploy to Vercel - great dev experience.
dzonga 5y ago
I would recommend mithril.js - simple comes with batteries included. and easy to start with, just include it in the script tag. with mithril you will find it easier to transition to the big boys - react, vue, etc. if you wanna start with the big boys, go with svelte though ecosystem is kinda small but the templates etc it's just writing html you're used to. react if you want something ergonomic and easy to find help with - well that is before the shit called hooks

game_the0ry 5y ago

Back end developers are not needed in general. (Ducks from all the rotten vegetables being thrown at me) It was a joke, everyone! (I am a front end developer and I like teasing back end folks)

bborud 5y ago

Why would you want to go to that kind of event anyway? I've been to lord knows how many events fitting this description and I can remember exactly zero products or startups coming out of this.

_57jb 5y ago

Yeah, if you prescribe to the smoke and mirrors style. Sometimes the logic or capabilities of technology have to be explained at a cursory level just to provide some grounding. I made the same mistake as OP thinking I could dazzle my "investors". It was the early days of VR before controllers existed and I built a few peripherals to compensate for an interactive training environment (savings of 2MM travel/training etc). Demo was a hit, numbers were a hit, they started asking about tech, adoption, viability...I believed in VR but they needed to believe it was going to be real based on more than my enthusiasm. Shelved only to be revived five years later with someone else running it following a trail that had been clearly blazed by competition. I was happy for them but always wished I had been given a chance to take that shot before the wave hit. I just lacked the credentials and I was never clever enough to be a "baffle with bullshit" person. Backend people even just to say: "I am the authority and everything said here is possible. I will show you if you are seriously interested in the mechanics"

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karmakaze 5y ago

Title should be: Backend Developers Are Not Needed... to win most 'Hackathons' I can agree with this, as much as I dislike the trend as the 'hack'ing isn't on the system being prototyped, but rather the system of judging the event.

clem 5y ago

When did hackathons become about "winning"? I thought it was a chance to test out new solutions that your day-to-day job wouldn't necessarily give you the opportunity to explore.

spacemanmatt 5y ago

I don't see the point of starting an app without reactive OAUTH2, SQL, and HTTP support ready to use. It strains me to understand what tools people bring to hackathons in a usable form.

tlhunter 5y ago

I've won hackathons building real time multiplayer games. In those cases it was the backend that set it apart from the competition.