Let me ask you guys a questions, the people who say that Hackathons are great.
Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done.
And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face talking with people. The level of concentration required is blown by just one conversation.
Why not other structures for collaborative development?
I like taking one-hour walks with people I'm working with. Lots reason this works really well.
Demos are good too -- for sure. I could see a meetup where people got together to do one-on-one demos of projects they're currently working on.
I suspect that's what people are really doing btw at hackathons. :-)
If you go back and look at my piece and read the first sentence, you might get an idea of how I approached this.
Dave - I like hackathons. In particular I like the 24 hour constraint. Having to build something in 24 hours (really probably 18 hours), forces me to make decisions, to get to the heart of the problem. Similarly, building something that I know I will only have 2 minutes to demo makes me really focus on what is important. I think the constraints lead to more creativity, just like the Haiku with 17 verses and 3 lines opens the door for whole libraries of verse.
Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done.
And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face talking with people. The level of concentration required is blown by just one conversation.
Why not other structures for collaborative development?
I like taking one-hour walks with people I'm working with. Lots reason this works really well.
Demos are good too -- for sure. I could see a meetup where people got together to do one-on-one demos of projects they're currently working on.
I suspect that's what people are really doing btw at hackathons. :-)
If you go back and look at my piece and read the first sentence, you might get an idea of how I approached this.
It was just a blog post, btw, not a manifesto!
People here are reading way too much into it.