Are Hackathons Overrated? Part 1

Google searching will give you many reasons why hackathons are a waste of time:

• Code you write will never get used.

• Not enough time to create anything meaningful.

• Self-induced heartburn from junk food and obscene amounts of caffeine.

I can confirm that the code you write at a hackathon MAY never get used… but that’s not the point. I have participated in many hackathons since becoming a software developer in 2017. I have even organized my own. I think they are actually one of the most wholesome activities for a technologist in an industry that is pretty turbulent right now. They feel like watching an episode of Ted Lasso after binging on The Last of Us. Let me show you how these quirky, chaotic events, when done right, can be the comedic relief your work life desperately needs.

The Motivation

The first hackathon I participated in was the Spring of 2018 when I was attending a coding bootcamp. It was called Go Code Colorado, and teams had to come up with an app that used publicly available data to help local businesses. I formed a team with an incredible group of four women software engineers and one man. We dubbed our team The Mostly Lady Coders. We bonded over a weekend at an airbnb in Boulder and stayed up late laughing a shit ton and built an app. I think we came in third place regionally. It was awesome.

Admittedly, the code we wrote never made it to a production environment or got used by a single Colorado business. But three months later, one of the Lady Coders referred me to my first software engineer job. My starting salary was 80K; more than double what I made before I knew how to code.

#1: Hackathons are worth your time because they can expand your network and get a job.

A year later, I signed up for another hackathon called Ruby for Good. We were not allowed to call it a hackathon because the founder did not like the negative connotations associated with the word. The “Coding Conference” took place in Washington D.C. and we slept in college dormitories for a long weekend.

This “Coding Conference” was different from my first hackathon: each team centered around a non-profit. The non-profit was the driver of the project, not the coders. I volunteered to serve as a team lead and was placed on the Abalone team, a marine biology research lab that wanted to convert their Excel spreadsheets into a hosted application and database.

When I arrived at the event, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I had conducted a few scoping meetings with the stakeholders from the marine lab in the weeks prior to the event. But when I arrived onsite there were a group of eight, eager developers with no context of the project and I had no idea how to give them direction or delegate tasks. It was a crash course in Product Management. I felt like I had failed to prepare my team.

On the upside, the Ruby for Good organizers stressed that the weekend was about more than our code: it was about building community, mentoring, and playing board games with random strangers until you became friends. The primary goal was to have a good time.

I excel at having a good time. I met a dev who was a single-mom with a difficult background of separating herself from her ultra-religious upbringing. She was so kind and positive and gave me advice to create a home wherever I was. I met another dev who introduced me to the Aperol Spritz and the board game Captain Sonar. He could also recite poetry from memory that perfectly fit the mood of a moment. I got to know another dev who, after giving me shit when I called him quiet, explained his love of House music. He was not actually quiet; he developed a habit of being reserved in English-speaking settings after being repeatedly criticized for his English by his teachers and classmates after immigrating to the US at five years old.

I met people who were really different from me and created a connection with them over the course of a weekend. It was wild. When I registered for Ruby for Good, I felt like a super-nerd spending my free time and money traveling to D.C. to spend a weekend with complete strangers to write code. It was incredibly validating to meet other technologists / super-nerds who, like me, cared about good causes outside of their day jobs.

#2 Hackathons are worth your time because they can provide the setting for connecting with others and finding shared purpose.

Despite my terrible PM skills, my team stepped up and successfully built a user interface, connected a database, and deployed an MVP app for our stakeholders by the end of the weekend. When I arrived home, I felt this incredibly big feeling of having just returned from something important. As a bonus, I knew the code I contributed to was being used and hopefully adding value to somebody’s life.

Ruby for Good 2019: Proof that shared purpose does not need to entail saving the world. It can simply be a bunch of nerds spending their weekend writing code to save snails.

The third hackathon I participated in was at work. My company Bonusly hosted a weeklong, internal hackathon where the only rule was to build something that could add business value. I led a small team to create a Slack integration using their new Block Kit Builder API. It was a huge success that got deployed and actually increased user engagement with our SaaS app. I used the experience as fodder for my promotion later that year, as well as a talking point when I was interviewing for other jobs.

#3 Hackathons are worth your time because they can provide real business value and help people.

At this point I was a hackathon evangelist. I signed up for the next Ruby for Good which was set to take place in San Francisco in April, 2020.

You’ve heard it before: change of plans. Coronavirus chaos struck and the conference pivoted to an all-remote format. But it wasn’t the same. The thought of discussing code to people in Zoom boxes after I had literally just finished doing that at work made me question why I had chosen a career that required looking at a screen all day. I dropped out halfway through.

During the pandemic, my desire to code outside my day job came to an abrupt stop. I didn’t participate in remote meetups or hackathons. I started my first all-remote dev job and my guest bedroom became my office. Like many people, I struggled with loneliness. My ambitious outlook on work and life was reduced to “I just need to get through today.”

By the time 2022 arrived, I was ready to get back out there. I missed in-person meetups and conferences and going into an office with 3-dimensional coworkers. I actually missed small talking in the break room. Deep down, I also missed meeting new people and the sense of genuine connection I found at Ruby for Good.

I had an idea: what if I organized my own hackathon? I already loved them, and wanted to create that experience for others. I also knew what it would take to organize a good one. Or so I thought.