What is a hackathon

[James E Keenan]

On 1/30/14 12:48 PM, Pete Wright wrote:
>
>
> 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 .
>>
>

"What is a hackathon?" elicited deep and profound discussion at a New 
York Perlmongers social meeting earlier tonight.

Everyone in the bar ... errrrm, everyone at the table agreed there were 
three varieties current:

> 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.
>

1. Perhaps the most recent variant to emerge:  the "within-the-company, 
(hopefully) cross-team" hackathon.  Had one at $job two weeks ago; know 
of several NYC other companies that have done this in last two years.

2. A more outward-facing type of hackathon is where a government agency 
(e.g., the MTA) or occasionally a company opens up their data and 
encourages competition among non-staff people to develop apps based on 
that data.

> 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).
>

3. This is the type I'm most familiar with:  the hackathon aimed at 
furthering the work of an open-source project and building a community 
around that project.  Quite common in the Perl world.  If you are 
interested in my thoughts on this, see:

"How to get the most out of a hackathon"
http://thenceforward.net/perl/yapc/YAPC-NA-2007/houslight/

"Let's have a distributed hackathon"
http://blogs.perl.org/users/kid51/2012/10/lets-have-a-distributed-perl-hackathon.html

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan