At least with hardware, people are actually making something and have to use their brains.

Making people feel my pain or communicating effectively quickly I'm total garbage at.

Hackathons are now only this. They have turned into an exercise that highlights my core weaknesses and that's why 25 years into my career I'm going to them almost every weekend.

This is the stuff I really need to get better at and finally, I am. Slowly but also, provably.

Also, this problem is unique: I call it "the trailhead". You get deep into the problem (the trail) and forget what it looked like at the trailhead and thus fail to compel the product because you spend your time on the wrong level of details and the wrong aspects.

That's why you can pitch something not yours better then your own stuff.

But then says this means software is “solved” so only hardware hackathons matter. Why?

If anything, I think software hackathons have become more useful, because ideas have become more useful. Even if ideas are cheap, not everyone has 24-72 hours for a prototype, in a creativity-inducing space that may inspire better details.

And software isn’t solved: some ideas still require low-level knowledge and skill to translate into prototypes, especially if the hackathon judges require some functionality.

Whether your purpose of a hackathon is:

- Make a prototype, then if it seems useful afterwards rewrite it into a full product

- Make a prototype that seems useful to attract investors (whether you start a company that may not launch or apply to a company that wants your creativity)

- As an organizer, find ideas related to your company

- Have fun, enjoy free food and good company

A couple examples (both from HackPrinceton, which had the best EE labs):

* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/electronic-banjo (crowd favorite)

* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/spin-to-win (a "moonshot" idea)

There's something nice about holding your work in your hands. Tangible work is also both easy to explain, and hard to fake. So going the hardware route felt fun, fulfilling, and scored well.

Good times.

I'm excited to see software engineers and teams morph into the next stage of product builders!

I begrudgingly went to one a few months ago and I was absolutely shocked, it was a two-day one, not even going to mention the programming language because at this point it probably doesn't matter, since only about 20% (tops) of the talks/presentations were strictly about programming.

A small assemble of self-defined industry champions took the floor once after the other to preach about their holiness and the outstanding work they have done for the community in areas that bordered software engineering as much as Iceland limits the Indian Ocean.

It was lecture after lecture, it was lifestyle, it was virtue-signaling, it was everything but programming. There was a single ham-fisted workshop that did not even had enough time to build on the basics of what was trying to accomplish, and there was a guy who I had as a personal hero of sorts that went in there to talk about some internal package manager drama.

NEXT! never again. It's all rotten to the core.

It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y

We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com

When my daughter was 4 y.o. she went to robotics classes where they assembled a small LEGO robot and made software for it using environment like Scratch. That's a good activity, but my point is that doing some assembly doesn't put the task into entirely different category of difficulty

I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).

But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.

I can’t imagine going to a hackathon just to not write any code and outsource it all to an LLM. I wonder if any hackathons ban LLMs?

The other presentation that stuck out, iirc, became leet codes.

I just recently turned an old guitar hero controller into a fully functioning midi controller and it took so a little time. It actually makes me laugh

I swear the bar with AI now is just the craziest things that you can think of

Enterprise is just fishing for other people's ideas that they can use as their own

If you truly had a novel and useful idea, someone else can just steal it and recreate it themselves

"and then this happened, then this happened, then this feature, then this feature"

Wow that's crazy...

If you have kiddos in Germany: jugendhackt.org

> ...the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code...

> ...iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task...

The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware?

Since the advent of SBCs and microcontroller kits, software devs have felt the same way about hardware being trivial. Yet, a hardware engineer still makes a massive difference in the outcome of the project.

Really? Maybe if we do not care about robustness, elegance, coherence, consistency and generally anything beyond making a buck and leaving more waste behind... sure!

I think any idea of discipline demonstrations will get whittled away until its more like battlebots or robot wars

Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves

We’re in the age of human hand crafted creativity.

Imperfections of value.