Ask HN: Hackathon at Launch?

Re:Ask HN: Hackathon at Launch? by DTrejo on Saturday February 19, 2011 @11:35PM (#2241031)

Just semi-hosted a hackathon recently. Key elements:

    - good desks / places to sit and code
    - reliable internet
    - free dinner, midnight and/or 3am food
    - healthy food in addition to junky food
    - some like energy drinks
    - don't have people pitch their ideas
    - have an official wiki for people to post their team+idea
    - tell contestants your judging criteria before the hackathon starts 
      (and make sure judges know it)

    - keep presentations speedy, with a gong to keep people honest 
      (<5mins for final demos)

    - have a nice big central room for everyone to code in 
      (don't spread people out across the building)

    - don't require judges to give feedback after each demo

Some of these are lessons learned from the New England College Hackathon (http://nech2011.com/).

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Re:Ask HN: Hackathon at Launch? by thegoleffect on Sunday February 20, 2011 @12:54AM (#2241167)

+1 for reliable internet. One dinky router is not enough to satisfy 200 hackers. I've been to half a dozen with internet issues and it destroys productivity. Even with iPhone tethering, if we had 200 tetherers the cross-interference would make it just as bad.

In addition to internet though, do not forget adequate power - electricity.

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Re:Ask HN: Hackathon at Launch? by petercooper on Sunday February 20, 2011 @02:11AM (#2241291)

+2. At a hack day I was at recently, it took the guy next to me 10 hours to install Git (from source), Ruby (from source), download some gems and get Rails running because the bandwidth was so in and out. His bad for not coming with a properly set up machine, but still..

Good Internet can undo a lot of miseries.

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Re:Ask HN: Hackathon at Launch? by DTrejo on Sunday February 20, 2011 @03:33AM (#2241418)

A few I forgot / gleaned from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240226:

- if any organizers are competing, don't allow their teams to them enter

- don't let sponsors bother coders (a few brief interviews and a pitch at the beginning is OK, but asking everyone to do a survey is not the best idea.)

- explicitly have contestants outline what they actually built during the hackathon, or have judges go around and talk to people ala http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240576. Or check git/svn logs.

- have contestants list # of team members so judges can weight this into their decision (otherwise winning is super hard for 1-person teams)

- discourage non-workers from attending and distracting coders

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