It's whatever you want it to be. You can choose to turn up with winning as you're only goal, then spend a couple of sleepless days hammering things together. Personally I take it as an opportunity to play around with silly ideas a bit, but mostly drift around the place chatting with the other people about what they're doing.

Last time I did one I ended up not really attaching myself to a team at all because I had some family issues come up early in the weekend that needed sorting out, and I think that ended up being the most fun I've had at a hackathon - I spent the entire weekend just chatting to people, and occasionally helping out teams with issues they were having where I had some experience. It turned into a mentorthon, which is honestly much more satisfying.

If your goal is to win a prize, why would you wait until the hackathon starts before finishing your project?

I did a handful of hackathons before I transitioned from hobbyist coder to professional coder.

There were a ton of benefits to me personally.

I got to see a ton of different working styles and tech stacks. I got exposed to a lot of the more “playful” side of the technologist’s Internet. I got to see what it took to rapidly stand up a winning “demo,” while it being completely obvious to us (the winners) that we didn’t have the best idea OR best implementation of an idea.

Most of all, though, it was really fun to meet technologists from all walks of life and party with them, drinking too much alcohol and caffeine in a high-pressure environment. It made for a great way to bond with a bunch of people when I was otherwise just a disconnected hobbyist.

I think the tone of the hackathon is really important. I’ve only ever done non-profit based hackathons: art, civics, etc. where the central task is on the order of “what cool or fun thing can we do to make the world more beautiful, more fun, or just better?”

Also, it’s an excuse for people to try out ideas and stacks that they weren’t otherwise willing to give themselves time to explore.

There's usually quite a strong "time crunch" element. In my more snooty moods I say hackathons only teach bad habits and how to throw together software in a dreadfully hacky rushed manner. But in truth these are not always bad habits. Delivering a quick prototype to a tight deadline is a useful skill. I usually fail miserably at hackathons, which I find interesting. I think it means I should hone my dreadful hackery skills, because I can be too slow and considered and perfectionistic as a developer.

>I think it means I should hone my dreadful hackery skills, because I can be too slow and considered and perfectionistic as a developer.

very nicely said.

If it's all you practice, yeah you'll have had habits in longer software development. However, hackathons are good for figuring out how to reduce friction when you do need to sprint

I've ran some student hackathons in the UK (worth noting we have a very different culture than the US scene) and we actually tried to discourage the whole working 24 hours straight thing.

Events are more just workshops / hanging out, with projects being more of a secondary thing.

I thought people bring stuff that’s almost done anyway, fiddle on it a bit, but mostly just socialize, then present the great thing they supposedly hacked together in the end.

Yeah that's been my impression at a lot of hackathons, but I think it has be accepted at least to some extent, as just "good preparation" rather than cheating. In fact I'd recommend doing it (Pre-wrangle the dataset into the format you need. Test out some tools. Prepare some components to assemble). I've only been organised enough to do this on a couple of occasions, but this way I've enjoyed the event more. More likely to achieve satisfactory hack project, and/or more time to socialise at the event.

To each their own, I guess, but I don’t understand why you’d waste a hackathon in that way.

If the hackathon has a $10,000 cash prize for first place, you honestly think that people aren't going to show up with pre-built stuff?

Well sure, definitely. But at any prize that’s enough to be a sole reason for a person to enter a hackathon, imho that’s either 1) a poorly designed hackathon or 2) a really ugly way for a company to fund R&D.

I’ve never participated in a hackathon with a 1st prize worth over $500, and I’m not sure I’d want to. But I guess if I had a bunch of random unmonetized projects sitting around then entering them into high-prize-value hackathons could be a way to shop them around. I’m just not sure why an organization would call an event like that a “hackathon.”

haha! yes, that happened in my previous workplace. many people would keep fully-finished side projects , that they alone use everyday to save time, ready including fancy shiny ppts for "next quarter's hackathon"

total

I participated in a 24 hour hackathon. The first 8 hours or so were fun, the rest was scrambling to get by while drinking lots of Red Bull and thinking that I'd rather be home sleeping. Maybe it was just a particularly bad one, but it's not an experience I want to go through again.

I'm a very frequent game jam participant. At my first jam I crunched the whole time with tons of energy drinks, but after a few ones I decided to not use caffeine or any other stimulants (with possible exception at the very end) and to get plenty of sleep and water during the event instead. Never regretted.

Turns out you code better when well rested.

Hahaha, that makes a lot of sense. I participated in a game jam recently as well and that was a great experience, and now that you mention it the fact that I was at home and had a nice 8 hours of sleep might have contributed to that.

It all depends. I've only ever participated in "work hackathons", and they've all been pretty easy and chill. No stress, no pressure, no obligations.

I’d note that there are many different kinds of hackathons, which vary wildly in terms of length, ambition and seriousness, so everyone’s answer is going to be different.

At my previous employer, we did 2 hackathons a year. They were structured so that you could go hard on something you cared a lot about if you wanted to, or you could walk around checking out the (often pretty novel and cool) projects that the teams were working on. There was free food, karaoke, one time there was a cover band playing dance music. If you didn’t want to do a hackathon project, you could take a course on Lynda or Pluralsight, or just goof off and hang out. However, it was a sort of “enforced holiday” where normal day-to-day work was halted.

Sometimes people would work on an incremental quality-of-life improvement to the product that normally wouldn’t be prioritized, with the goal of actually getting them into the product. I’d usually start teams doing really ambitious projects with lots of whiz-bang stuff with the goal of getting the product folks to think bigger about where our product could go. It was a lot of fun, and I think more companies should run hackathons this way.

If you want to do things according to the organizer's schedule, you can (e.g. mingle-code-pizza-nap-code-nap-breakfast-wander-code-wrap up-present) - and if you don't want to, you can not, also. You can write a single line of code, or a thousand. You can talk to no one, or you can only talk, if you want. The main conceivable reason for it to not be whatever you want it to be is if it's like something your company is making you go to, but even still I don't think you'd be forced to work / unable to socialize.

I consider hackathons and game jams where I didn't get to socialize to be failed ones. Some of the best ones where when I put together the whole project in last few hours.

Also, for some people working for a couple of days under time crunch is the best way to spark their creative output (which may or may not be a sign of possible ADHD, by the way ;])

I've been to a Google Hackathon once. And was surprised how little time we had on our computers.