To give a little background to a Twitter conversation I had this week:<\/p>\n
I came across a hackathon announcement<\/a> that sounded pretty interesting. It\u2019s scheduled from a Thursday afternoon until Saturday night, with \u201copen ended\u201d hacking starting at 19:30 on Thursday.<\/p>\n I tweeted<\/a>: \u201cIf hackathons<\/strong> weren\u2019t designed for people without a life\/family<\/strong>, I\u2019d be in!\u201d<\/p>\n The organizer responded<\/a>: \u201cOur Hackathon takes only 2,5 days. I guess you could easily find a way to attend :-)\u201d<\/p>\n My answer<\/a>: \u201cI guess you could easily find a way to \u201chack\u201d in daytime, sparing nights and weekends :-)\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d honestly love to be there. I enjoy being exposed to passionate people and their ideas, and to get creative together. But I\u2019m too old for pulling all-nighters. And I don\u2019t want to miss seeing my kids<\/strong> before they go to bed, and spending the weekend together with my family, unless there\u2019s an extremely good reason to. (A customer\u2019s production system going down is a good reason. A just-for-fun hackathon isn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n The typical hackathon format which assumes or glorifies coding all night feels exclusionary<\/strong> to me. It\u2019s a hurdle for the working single mom, for the introvert (who needs a break after 10 hours of intense socializing), and for us older geeks. I wonder whether you really are after the best ideas and results, or rather want to polish your image with Instagram pics of overcaffeinated hipster hackers. (I\u2019m not judging you. I honestly just wonder.)<\/p>\n Martin W Brennan makes similar points in Why Many Developers Don’t Participate in Hackathons<\/a>: \u201cAlex Bayley discussed her reasons for not loving hackathons [\u2026], such as the physical demands of a 24- or 48-hour event (Bayley is 39 years old). This also brings with it health concerns<\/strong> involving poor lighting, ventilation and diet, as well as excessive caffeine intake to stay awake for an unnatural number of hours. [\u2026] Age-related exclusions<\/strong> result from older potential participants often having too many real-world responsibilities to take part, but the exclusions seem to extend to gender as well.\u201d<\/p>\n These folks are proposing alternatives:<\/p>\n Will Larson \u2013 Healing a Burned Out Team<\/a>: \u201cHackathons during working hours<\/strong> are a great opportunity for the team to try out something new, ideally with people on the team they don\u2019t work with as often, and get in some positive experiences together. (I\u2019ve historically been very anti-hackathon because they are so often scheduled in a way [that] prevents individuals with families and external demands<\/strong> from participating, but I\u2019ve since found that they\u2019re pretty effective and purely positive if you can schedule them exclusively during normal working hours over the course of a day or two.)\u201d<\/p>\n Chris Gathercole \u2013 Hackathon? No, not yet. Ideas Splurge!<\/a>: \u201cHackathons are [\u2026] a big commitment from everyone involved (at least two longer-than-9-to-5 days out of the working week). They are [\u2026] highly stressful<\/strong> (if done properly) even for the experienced contestants. [\u2026] An Ideas Splurge [\u2026] is more inclusive, and less off-putting to newbies. [\u2026] It leaves folks wanting more, rather than, as with many hackathons, ‚well, I\u2019m glad that\u2019s over‘.\u201d<\/p>\n Update (2016-11-14):<\/em> Someone linked to this post on Reddit; here\u2019s a couple of interesting comments<\/a>. I realize my wording triggers \u201csocial justice warrior\u201d vocabulary alert; I\u2019ll try to be more constructive in future blog posts. \u2013 Given that \u201chackathon\u201d is derived from \u201cmarathon\u201d, it may be stupid of me to criticize the format for being stressful and tiring \ud83d\ude42 But the point that I want to make is that when your goal is to bring developers and subject matter experts together to collaborate and innovate (as the Wikipedia \u201cHackathon\u201d page<\/a> says), you may be missing out on some valuable contributions depending on the time and format you\u2019re choosing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To give a little background to a Twitter conversation I had this week: I came across a hackathon announcement that sounded pretty interesting. It\u2019s scheduled from a Thursday afternoon until Saturday night, with \u201copen ended\u201d hacking starting at 19:30 on Thursday. I tweeted: \u201cIf hackathons weren\u2019t designed for people without a life\/family, I\u2019d be in!\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weblog"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}