My problem with hackathons

Initially, when I heard first about the idea of hackathons, I loved it. I was going through my grind era back then and immediately wanted to participate in one. The 24-hour locked-in grind with your friends - fell in love instantly. I didn't know much at first, mostly that you code, upload repo, and present your proof of concept or working solution. This definition of the hackathon was attached to my mind.

Disclaimer: this post is extremely biased since I've participated in only two hackathons but it highlights well my personal thoughts about "this" kind of hackathons.

BiteHack 2022

The first hackathon I participated in was BiteHack 2022 with my lovely 3 other smart-as-hell colleagues. The theme was “Saving” because of the green energy hype at the moment. After some brainstorming, we decided to go with my idea which was to create an app that would intelligently distribute your workloads. For example, if you need to learn for a Maths exam and you estimate that you need roughly 20 hours total (or go by the hours per day) then our algorithm would distribute and schedule a certain portion of study sessions for your calendar. But hey, it’s not that simple, it cooperates with your private calendar, so you do not have to worry if the study sessions scheduled overlap with anything. It works even better if you specify your preferences such as preferred learning time, session duration, breaks (if any), studying more on weekends, and so on.

But you may ask what about the hackathon theme? Saving? Saving what?

Yes, the main reason we did that is because many students (including myself) suffer from the “not today, I have to study sorry” syndrome. Let me quickly explain it by example. You have a Maths exam next week. Today is Monday. You do not want to go out with friends because you seem “not deserve it”, or “you should be rather studying”. But the trick is that our mind is very cunning. The mind knows that if it’s next week then you have plenty of time so you do not have to start right away. Yet the conscience is also there and it won’t let you have fun either.

The main point is that by scheduling your workload you are letting your mind and conscience acknowledge - hey I have it all planned, look there is time for everything. And our app called Activity Time Scheduler - did very that. We coded everything. It was more than proof of concept - it was 70% MVP. We did not win. We did not score any place. We weren't even mentioned at the final ceremony.

Why?

Our 5-minute presentation was not enough. The product lacked a business idea. Every jury asked everyone, how will that product earn me money? Why would I invest in it? We did not think about that. We wanted to build something good that works. And it worked. We spent almost a third of the time integrating our app with Google Calendar (which was a nightmare by the way). We managed to achieve that but no one cared. Literally, no one cared. We thought it was our most important feature. It was painful because we were all engaged to implement this for nothing.

Do you know what brought more value? Someone who stood on stage with their Figma prototypes behind their back and talked about how they “will” integrate the advanced AI model they trained and how it will solve all their problems.

We felt deceived.

But in the end we had fun and gained useful knowledge…

BiteHack 2023

Next year I participated once again and I took a leadership role in our also 4-man team. We created Astral which I won’t talk much about here - check the presentation if you are curious. We did code the POC and it was extremely fun to play with. We tested the app with another student (thanks for the quick deploys Kamil!) and they genuinely loved the idea. On the stage, we talked a lot about what should be included next in our app to make it big and grow. We talked about the future of our product instead of what the current state is.

Result? Second place.

It felt good. But I didn’t want to participate anymore. It felt wrong to me because I value existing code more than fake promises.

Little correction

Yes, yes, yes. I know that hackathons are not about coding. They are about creating a business idea and presenting it. But I love seeing real results of work. Not fake promises. Real code. Like come on, show what you did accomplish in 24 hours. Not what you will accomplish in 24 months.

import type { Code, Score } from "hackathon";

type MyTeam = Score<Code>;
//^? type MyTeam = "2nd place"

type BetterTeam = Score<Promise<Code>>;
//^? type OtherTeam = "1st place"