What is a hackathon

[Pete Wright]

On 01/30/14 05:30, Mark Saad wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 30, 2014, at 7:16 AM, Sujit K M <sjt.kar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Mark Saad <mark.saad at ymail.com> wrote:
>>> All
>>> I know this may sound like a silly question but I wanted to get a broad opinion on this.
>>> My "friends" job announced they would be having a company hackathon, where groups would be
>>
>> I find that suse as a company does do this in their calendar. These
>> are very intense sessions/hotly
>> debated and questioned by participants, i guess audience. This is
>> supposed to be done to increase
>> productivity of their staff.
>>
>> -- 
>> -- Sujit K M
>>
>> blog(http://kmsujit.blogspot.com/)
> 
> 
> I see. It like this , some of us haven't been working at hip enough companies to understand the new definition .  But then again why would a "new" company be against the traditional style of hackathon ? I say this as after this conversation started , off list, "[that] a traditional hackathon would be too boring for most new companies. You would have a hard time selling , let's have a hackathon to fix the spread sheets we use !"  But as far as I am concerned that's the sort of hackathon a new company , or in some cases any company, should have . 
> 

in my personal experience hackathon's at startups is that they are used
for two purposes usually:

1) recruiting tool to try to convince young guns that despite the fact
they have been working on refactoring a single class to parse JSON for
three weeks they'll be able to actually do something interesting during
the yearly hackathon.

2) a tool for product people to come up with new stuff to sell when they
have run out of ideas.

I've never seen it used in the sense that OpenBSD or other OSS projects
originally intended - i.e. a day or week to sit down and crank out lots
of work in person with your fellow collaborators (due to the
geographically distributed nature of these projects).


personally speaking i'm more in favor of the now defunct google %20 rule
- where people are able to put %20 of their $JOB time to use on projects
that are not directly related to their primary domain.  seems that
people do this anyway so may as well encourage it...


-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
twitter => @nomadlogicLA