How to Run Hackathons in 2024

The title of the blog post should be &quot;How to run a Hackathon if your only objective is to trend on GitHub&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been to many hackathons and also organized a few, and this is one of the most soulless incarnations of a hackathon I&#x27;ve seen.<p>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&#x27;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).

I ran a hack week a few months ago about postgres internals and it was super fun!<p>There weren&#x27;t prizes, it was just about getting ~100 devs into a discord for a week and seeing what happened. Most people who stayed involved posted an update once a day or so and as people wrote blog posts or published a project I added it to the hack week page.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to doing more in the future on topics like compression algorithms or emulators or CPython internals.<p>I&#x27;d also love to see more companies doing hackathons not just about <i>using</i> their product but <i>implementing</i> minimal versions. How better to find out how devs perceive your product, let alone a chance to teach your community and identify potential hires! If you want to try this I&#x27;d be happy to chat with you about my experience!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eatonphil.com&#x2F;2023-10-wehack-postgres.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eatonphil.com&#x2F;2023-10-wehack-postgres.html</a>

&gt; hackathon is a (physical or virtual) competition where people contribute code to you in a manner you decide on and get prizes.<p>Having been through a couple of Hackathons, rest assured that there are plenty of Hackathons that are more focused on the business case rather than the implementation. I&#x27;ve seen hackathons won by teams that didn&#x27;t write a single line of code. It was all mocked up in Powerpoint or similar.

I&#x27;m still on the fence on whether I think this is a good idea or not…<p>It does feel like frabricating&#x2F;buying github activity with money… but it also does feel like I can&#x27;t argue that they are doing something with malicious intent…

I have been to a couple of hackathons as participant and as organizer. Some sessions where really good and some were really terrible. The biggest takeaway for me in organizing a hackathon is to keep in mind that technical people who participate tend to be rather competitive folks who put a lot of soul into their work. So if you have no fair and clear evaluation system and PowerPoint designs compete with code, frustration is sure to happen.

I remember you popping into the ChatGPT-Hackers discord (which I’m no longer part of) a while back with your guide on how to get GitHub stars.<p>I really don’t like the gamification of GitHub stars. It feels like abuse from marketing departments

I really wish there were more non-collegiate hackathons available out there.

It&#x27;s not clear to me how this guidance is specific to 2024?

Last time I was at a hackathon there was a bunch of drama about openROV, but it was like, 2011. Should I give it a try again?

Can one of your kind souls explain a hackathon for someone who is self taught and feels impostor syndrome?

If you run an in person Hackathon (or really, any event in 2024) then please read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thegauntlet.news&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-the-press-manufactured-consent" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thegauntlet.news&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-the-press-manufactured-co...</a> first.