5 ms·

My Second Hackathon Changed My Life

103 points by jonmarkgo 12y ago

hadardor 12y ago
Really enlightening post - gotta love what's been going on with the hackathon community over the past couple years!
- theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
  It's amazing how far things have come. I remember when there were only maybe 5 student hackathons happening every year. Now there are like 150 and they're happening all over the world. /me wishes was still student sometimes
- kandalf 12y ago
  The student hackathon movement has definitely evolved super quickly in the last five years (as Swift says, 5 -> 150, or more than 100% growth year over year). I'd be curious to hear more stats about how hackathons in general have grown in the same time period.
ranman 12y ago
Hackathons are a lot of fun and I enjoy attending them. I'd love to see them get more diverse. MLH has been a great organization to work with so far. One of my favorite things about Hackathons is that no matter where you are in the world you meet people who are interested in the same things. They're not just interested though, they're capable. The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants.
- theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
  > The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants. Me too. Our most recent participant survey said that the most important three things to hackers were: 1. Fast Internet 2. Good Food 3. Healthy Food (different than good food apparently)
  - Fradow 12y ago
    I would add Sleep to the list. I would be interested to know how it was ranked in your survey. Most people at hackathons don't acknowledge that they need to sleep, which is bad for both their health and their productivity.
syphen 12y ago
I could not agree more with everything that you talk about in this post. StartupBus was my first real hackathon and it definitely changed my life.
thelonelygod 12y ago
I love reading stories like these. I hope more people in the community share first (or second) hackathon stories.
- theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
  +1. If you have a story to share, email us at hi@mlh.io. We'd love to share it with our community!
simplyluke 12y ago
I've had a couple of meals with Jon & Swift (founders of MLH) and can speak to their dedication to the hackathon community. They're really trying to encourage experiences like these for students around the country. Hackathons are the reason I got involved in the larger tech/startup community, an indirect (but crucial) reason I have a job right now, and have really come to be a very important culture for me. The work of MLH and Jon have made a large part of that possible. For those curious about the history of hackathons, Jon has a really great talk that he gave at HackCon last year about the history of hackathons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6VPAe9CKU&index=1&list=PLPDgudJ_VDUdqhQldG7SqXGxaj-FiLGmP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6VPAe9CKU&index=1&list=PLP...
- frankdenbow 12y ago
  Agreed, great guys leading the charge for the community.
MarcScott 12y ago
I took a bunch of high-school students to the MLH Launch hack in London and they had an amazing time, and were really inspired by everything that was going on around them. Unfortunately although MLH were very supportive of under 18s attending the hackathons, the venues weren't so accomodating, and it doesn't look like were going to get to go to another one. It would be nice to see more under 18 hackathons being organised to help inspire and engage teenagers. We have YRS in the UK and it's fantastic, but it only comes around once a year.
- iancarroll 12y ago
  Both MHacks and PennApps accept high school students. Sadly, the venues are usually universities with strict policies but there are still many that allow <18, like CodeDay events.
  - jmgrosen 12y ago
    Sadly, neither are on the west coast!
    - simplyluke 12y ago
      Both provide travel reimbursements and there are tons of HS-friendly hackathons on the west coast. HSHacks, HackGenY, LAHacks (IIRC they were cool with <18). Definitely could use more though.
  - akhilcacharya 12y ago
    The difficult part is getting in without any other Hackathon experience.
- simplyluke 12y ago
  Not sure about the UK scene, but I know hackathons for high schoolers in the US can also be challenging. I'm listing a few resources that have helped me below: * CodeDay - These happen around the US multiple times a year, there's likely one near you. I've helped organize a few of Austin's and they're a great organization. I would reach out to them to see about possibly getting an event in London going, don't know if they're able to expand internationally though. http://codeday.org/ http://codeday.org/ * HS Hackers - This is a Facebook group that was made a couple of years back at PennApps. It's now a community of 3,000+ young hackers. https://www.facebook.com/groups/PennAppsHS/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/PennAppsHS/ * A handful of HS-focussed hackathons: SoHacks (http://sohacks.com/ http://sohacks.com/), HSHacks (http://www.hshacks.com/ http://www.hshacks.com/), HackBCA (http://www.hackbca.com/ http://www.hackbca.com/), HackGenY (had international participants this year)(http://hackgeny.com/ http://hackgeny.com/) * HackEDU - Nonprofit started by @zachlatta that's starting hack clubs all around the country. I led ours in Austin and will lead it again next year: https://hackedu.us/ https://hackedu.us/
jzone3 12y ago
Loved this story. I can completely sympathize. I had been programming in school and for fun a little before my first hackathon, however I had not yet made any "real" apps. I attended my first hackathon a few years ago (pretty sure Jon was there). Like Jon, I joined a team of people with much more experienced than myself. They taught me a lot, helped me get started, and got me hooked on hackathons. After this hackathon, I started learning about web development, meeting others in the community, and of course attending more hackathons. If you are at all interested in programming or learning how to program, I encourage you to attend a hackathon. Check out some great ones here: http://mlh.io/events/ http://mlh.io/events/
kurtalee 12y ago
An inspiring read - I know of so many people that got dragged to their first hackathon thanks to persistent friends, myself included! Every single hackathon I've been to since have inspired me in one way or another - be it trying out the latest tech, the buzz from working on a hack over a short period of time, or just meeting & sharing the weekend with super awesome people! The hacker ethos is extremely transferrable as well, it's a mindset I promote a lot when I teach Computing to my secondary school students in the UK. It's all about getting the learners to take control of their own education & be as creative as they want about it. Proud to have MLH at the forefront of revolutionising how students learn, build and share ideas around technology. Very excited to be part of this growing global community and cannot wait to see what's to come! If you're in the EU, I would highly recommend checking out these upcoming hackathons (drag a friend along too!): http://mlh.io/eu/ http://mlh.io/eu/
sagnewshreds 12y ago
Excellent post Jon! It totally captures the vibes I got from my first few hackathons as well. The first one is always the scariest, especially when you have no idea what you are doing! I know at my first hackathon(HackRU #2 in Spring 2012), I didn't know a single person, and I had only known about the event via word of mouth on campus at Rutgers. This was before many schools had hackathons(the only ones I knew of even a semester later were PennApps, HackNY and HackPrinceton). I had practice with my band that day for a show we were playing, so I showed up really late(around midnight), hoping my friend Reggie would show up because we agreed to work together(he bailed...classic Reggie move!). I walked in confused as hell not knowing what to do until one of the organizers, Devon, came up to me and asked me if I just got there. He brought me to the registration booth and introduced me as "a bad ass hacker who works on projects outside of school" because I told him I made a game once. This blew my mind because I had never been described as a "hacker" before, let alone a bad ass one. I had only found out the day before that the term didn't necessarily have anything to do with computer security! At the time, I was a Physics/CS double major and the only thing I knew about programming was some Java from high school and whatever I learned in my Data Structures class. I thought that the main thing programmers were focused on was coming up with ways to make the Big O runtime of algorithms faster. So to go with the only thing I knew, I decided to come up with a data structure. I was working on a text based scrabble game in Java previously, and I knew that using an array for all of the words was very inefficient. So I came up with what I thought was a new tree structure in which the letters were stored as nodes. I pretty much stumbled upon prefix trees. I implemented this in Java with no team mate(because Reggie bailed), and coded straight through the night barely talking to anyone other than when food and t shirts were handed out. I was able to finish my hack(I built a really basic word game to demo its use) just in time to present. I was the first to demo, so I didn't know what the other projects were like. I've never seen anyone else do Big O analysis on the board at a hackathon since, but I did that day. I had some blank stares and a few laughs from the audience, but I had to leave early before all of the demos were finished(for some lame academic awards ceremony). It turns out later that I won best solo hack...because I was the ONLY solo hack! There were about 60 people at the event, which seemed like a lot at the time. I won a pretty kick ass MongoDB(although the company was called 10gen at the time) backpack, and it was all thanks to my buddy Reggie for bailing on me! It blew my mind that there was a community like this right under my nose at school, and I knew I had to get involved immediately. Seeing the things that other people built really amazed me. I had never before thought about the fact that programmers are like wizards. You can have an idea of something that you want to exist, and in a relatively small amount of time you can MAKE that thing happen. This first hackathon experience totally changed the way I thought about everything, and I knew I needed to go to more. Unfortunately, it was the end of the semester so I had to wait until the next school year. The next spring, I went to 10 hackathons in one semester, and there were only a couple of student ones. My friends and I pretty much found anything on HackerLeague within driving distance and stormed those events. If I had decided at the time that I had too much schoolwork and not enough time to go to HackRU, then I'd be sitting in a research lab right now and I probably would not be a developer at all.
HashHishBang 12y ago
Interesting, I'm glad to see people have positive experiences with Hackathons despite my own being horribly toxic. The reasoning given in the article is actually the impetus behind my decision to ditch hackathons (and later the "development" community in favor of QA Automation). The 'competition' portion of a hackathon usually messes me up in both approach to the work and the desired end goal. Whereas it seems to be a major portion of the attraction for the blog author and a lot of people in this thread. Perhaps it is a matter of teammates that I have participated with thus far, but trying to hack together a minimum-passable-product (note: not even viable but ~passable~) stuck me as an utter waste.
- jonmarkgo 12y ago
  If you go into the event hoping to build something productive or that has longevity, it will likely feel like a waste. But that's really not the point of hackathons, and seems to be a major factor that people take issue with. Especially for students/new programmers, the goal is to tinker with technology, have fun, and discover like-minded collaborators in a risk-free environment. You might be thinking - hey! a competition isn't risk-free - but really, compared to a work or academic environment there is far less risk involved with building something ambitious or using a technology you are completely unfamiliar with. The best hackathons don't focus on the competitive element, but instead create a system where people are rewarded for ambitious but not perfectly polished work. I wrote another blog post about that here: http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-since-moldy-sliced-bread-04-18-2014 http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...

103 points by jonmarkgo 12y ago

hadardor 12y ago

Really enlightening post - gotta love what's been going on with the hackathon community over the past couple years!

theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
It's amazing how far things have come. I remember when there were only maybe 5 student hackathons happening every year. Now there are like 150 and they're happening all over the world. /me wishes was still student sometimes
kandalf 12y ago
The student hackathon movement has definitely evolved super quickly in the last five years (as Swift says, 5 -> 150, or more than 100% growth year over year). I'd be curious to hear more stats about how hackathons in general have grown in the same time period.

ranman 12y ago

Hackathons are a lot of fun and I enjoy attending them. I'd love to see them get more diverse. MLH has been a great organization to work with so far. One of my favorite things about Hackathons is that no matter where you are in the world you meet people who are interested in the same things. They're not just interested though, they're capable. The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants.

theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
> The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants. Me too. Our most recent participant survey said that the most important three things to hackers were: 1. Fast Internet 2. Good Food 3. Healthy Food (different than good food apparently)
- Fradow 12y ago
  I would add Sleep to the list. I would be interested to know how it was ranked in your survey. Most people at hackathons don't acknowledge that they need to sleep, which is bad for both their health and their productivity.

syphen 12y ago

I could not agree more with everything that you talk about in this post. StartupBus was my first real hackathon and it definitely changed my life.

thelonelygod 12y ago

I love reading stories like these. I hope more people in the community share first (or second) hackathon stories.

theyCallMeSwift 12y ago
+1. If you have a story to share, email us at hi@mlh.io. We'd love to share it with our community!

simplyluke 12y ago

I've had a couple of meals with Jon & Swift (founders of MLH) and can speak to their dedication to the hackathon community. They're really trying to encourage experiences like these for students around the country. Hackathons are the reason I got involved in the larger tech/startup community, an indirect (but crucial) reason I have a job right now, and have really come to be a very important culture for me. The work of MLH and Jon have made a large part of that possible. For those curious about the history of hackathons, Jon has a really great talk that he gave at HackCon last year about the history of hackathons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6VPAe9CKU&index=1&list=PLPDgudJ_VDUdqhQldG7SqXGxaj-FiLGmP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6VPAe9CKU&index=1&list=PLP...

frankdenbow 12y ago
Agreed, great guys leading the charge for the community.

MarcScott 12y ago

I took a bunch of high-school students to the MLH Launch hack in London and they had an amazing time, and were really inspired by everything that was going on around them. Unfortunately although MLH were very supportive of under 18s attending the hackathons, the venues weren't so accomodating, and it doesn't look like were going to get to go to another one. It would be nice to see more under 18 hackathons being organised to help inspire and engage teenagers. We have YRS in the UK and it's fantastic, but it only comes around once a year.

iancarroll 12y ago
Both MHacks and PennApps accept high school students. Sadly, the venues are usually universities with strict policies but there are still many that allow <18, like CodeDay events.
- jmgrosen 12y ago
  Sadly, neither are on the west coast!
  - simplyluke 12y ago
    Both provide travel reimbursements and there are tons of HS-friendly hackathons on the west coast. HSHacks, HackGenY, LAHacks (IIRC they were cool with <18). Definitely could use more though.
- akhilcacharya 12y ago
  The difficult part is getting in without any other Hackathon experience.
simplyluke 12y ago
Not sure about the UK scene, but I know hackathons for high schoolers in the US can also be challenging. I'm listing a few resources that have helped me below: * CodeDay - These happen around the US multiple times a year, there's likely one near you. I've helped organize a few of Austin's and they're a great organization. I would reach out to them to see about possibly getting an event in London going, don't know if they're able to expand internationally though. http://codeday.org/ http://codeday.org/ * HS Hackers - This is a Facebook group that was made a couple of years back at PennApps. It's now a community of 3,000+ young hackers. https://www.facebook.com/groups/PennAppsHS/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/PennAppsHS/ * A handful of HS-focussed hackathons: SoHacks (http://sohacks.com/ http://sohacks.com/), HSHacks (http://www.hshacks.com/ http://www.hshacks.com/), HackBCA (http://www.hackbca.com/ http://www.hackbca.com/), HackGenY (had international participants this year)(http://hackgeny.com/ http://hackgeny.com/) * HackEDU - Nonprofit started by @zachlatta that's starting hack clubs all around the country. I led ours in Austin and will lead it again next year: https://hackedu.us/ https://hackedu.us/

jzone3 12y ago

Loved this story. I can completely sympathize. I had been programming in school and for fun a little before my first hackathon, however I had not yet made any "real" apps. I attended my first hackathon a few years ago (pretty sure Jon was there). Like Jon, I joined a team of people with much more experienced than myself. They taught me a lot, helped me get started, and got me hooked on hackathons. After this hackathon, I started learning about web development, meeting others in the community, and of course attending more hackathons. If you are at all interested in programming or learning how to program, I encourage you to attend a hackathon. Check out some great ones here: http://mlh.io/events/ http://mlh.io/events/

kurtalee 12y ago

An inspiring read - I know of so many people that got dragged to their first hackathon thanks to persistent friends, myself included! Every single hackathon I've been to since have inspired me in one way or another - be it trying out the latest tech, the buzz from working on a hack over a short period of time, or just meeting & sharing the weekend with super awesome people! The hacker ethos is extremely transferrable as well, it's a mindset I promote a lot when I teach Computing to my secondary school students in the UK. It's all about getting the learners to take control of their own education & be as creative as they want about it. Proud to have MLH at the forefront of revolutionising how students learn, build and share ideas around technology. Very excited to be part of this growing global community and cannot wait to see what's to come! If you're in the EU, I would highly recommend checking out these upcoming hackathons (drag a friend along too!): http://mlh.io/eu/ http://mlh.io/eu/

sagnewshreds 12y ago

Excellent post Jon! It totally captures the vibes I got from my first few hackathons as well. The first one is always the scariest, especially when you have no idea what you are doing! I know at my first hackathon(HackRU #2 in Spring 2012), I didn't know a single person, and I had only known about the event via word of mouth on campus at Rutgers. This was before many schools had hackathons(the only ones I knew of even a semester later were PennApps, HackNY and HackPrinceton). I had practice with my band that day for a show we were playing, so I showed up really late(around midnight), hoping my friend Reggie would show up because we agreed to work together(he bailed...classic Reggie move!). I walked in confused as hell not knowing what to do until one of the organizers, Devon, came up to me and asked me if I just got there. He brought me to the registration booth and introduced me as "a bad ass hacker who works on projects outside of school" because I told him I made a game once. This blew my mind because I had never been described as a "hacker" before, let alone a bad ass one. I had only found out the day before that the term didn't necessarily have anything to do with computer security! At the time, I was a Physics/CS double major and the only thing I knew about programming was some Java from high school and whatever I learned in my Data Structures class. I thought that the main thing programmers were focused on was coming up with ways to make the Big O runtime of algorithms faster. So to go with the only thing I knew, I decided to come up with a data structure. I was working on a text based scrabble game in Java previously, and I knew that using an array for all of the words was very inefficient. So I came up with what I thought was a new tree structure in which the letters were stored as nodes. I pretty much stumbled upon prefix trees. I implemented this in Java with no team mate(because Reggie bailed), and coded straight through the night barely talking to anyone other than when food and t shirts were handed out. I was able to finish my hack(I built a really basic word game to demo its use) just in time to present. I was the first to demo, so I didn't know what the other projects were like. I've never seen anyone else do Big O analysis on the board at a hackathon since, but I did that day. I had some blank stares and a few laughs from the audience, but I had to leave early before all of the demos were finished(for some lame academic awards ceremony). It turns out later that I won best solo hack...because I was the ONLY solo hack! There were about 60 people at the event, which seemed like a lot at the time. I won a pretty kick ass MongoDB(although the company was called 10gen at the time) backpack, and it was all thanks to my buddy Reggie for bailing on me! It blew my mind that there was a community like this right under my nose at school, and I knew I had to get involved immediately. Seeing the things that other people built really amazed me. I had never before thought about the fact that programmers are like wizards. You can have an idea of something that you want to exist, and in a relatively small amount of time you can MAKE that thing happen. This first hackathon experience totally changed the way I thought about everything, and I knew I needed to go to more. Unfortunately, it was the end of the semester so I had to wait until the next school year. The next spring, I went to 10 hackathons in one semester, and there were only a couple of student ones. My friends and I pretty much found anything on HackerLeague within driving distance and stormed those events. If I had decided at the time that I had too much schoolwork and not enough time to go to HackRU, then I'd be sitting in a research lab right now and I probably would not be a developer at all.

HashHishBang 12y ago

Interesting, I'm glad to see people have positive experiences with Hackathons despite my own being horribly toxic. The reasoning given in the article is actually the impetus behind my decision to ditch hackathons (and later the "development" community in favor of QA Automation). The 'competition' portion of a hackathon usually messes me up in both approach to the work and the desired end goal. Whereas it seems to be a major portion of the attraction for the blog author and a lot of people in this thread. Perhaps it is a matter of teammates that I have participated with thus far, but trying to hack together a minimum-passable-product (note: not even viable but ~passable~) stuck me as an utter waste.

jonmarkgo 12y ago
If you go into the event hoping to build something productive or that has longevity, it will likely feel like a waste. But that's really not the point of hackathons, and seems to be a major factor that people take issue with. Especially for students/new programmers, the goal is to tinker with technology, have fun, and discover like-minded collaborators in a risk-free environment. You might be thinking - hey! a competition isn't risk-free - but really, compared to a work or academic environment there is far less risk involved with building something ambitious or using a technology you are completely unfamiliar with. The best hackathons don't focus on the competitive element, but instead create a system where people are rewarded for ambitious but not perfectly polished work. I wrote another blog post about that here: http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-since-moldy-sliced-bread-04-18-2014 http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...