Sounds scary, right? Don’t worry, it’s not that type of hacking.
Over
the past year, hackathons have taken the country by storm. You might
have even seen a small one in “The Social Network.” No, we don’t break
into your school’s computers. Yes, we do sometimes drink beer.
“A hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming.” -Wikipedia
Hackathons
provide a venue for self-expression and creativity through technology.
People with technical backgrounds come together, form teams around a
problem or idea, and collaboratively code a unique solution from
scratch — these generally take shape in the form of websites, mobile
apps, and robots.
A notable example of a hackathon “hack,” GroupMe is a group messaging app that was acquired by Skype
for over $50 million. Other notable examples include the Facebook
“Like” button and Facebook Chat which were both first demoed at internal
company hackathons. Tess Rinearson has a great list of “The 8 Kinds of Projects You Meet at a Hackathon.”
Take PennApps and MHacks,
the two largest student hackathons, for example. They bring together
over 1000 student hackers from universities across the globe for one of
the most high-energy weekends of their lives. Students get to the
hackathon, and, within a couple hours, are working furiously on a
project with a motley group of people that they may have just met. Over
the course of the weekend, they learn how to work with new technologies,
throw together tons of code, and hopefully finish what they set out to
build.
Despite
the complete lack of sleep, these events are addicting, and the
community building around them is growing faster than ever. Instead of
meeting at a coffee shop or conference to discuss the world’s problems
every weekend, you’ll find many of these students at a hackathon
tackling them head on. To facilitate this fast-growing tidal wave of
hackathons, Mike Swift started Major League Hacking which aims to be the NCAA of Hackathons.
Whether
we are building a website, mobile app, or even hardware hack, the goal
is to start from scratch and end with a working prototype. Generally,
these events last from 24-48 hours and are filled with food, caffeine,
prizes, and, you guessed it, more caffeine. After time runs out, teams
demo what they’ve built and compete for prizes.
To sum it up, at a hackathon, people come together and use technology to transform ideas into reality.
“The word hackathon is a portmanteau of the words hack and marathon, where hack
is used in the sense of playful, exploratory programming, not its
alternate meaning as a reference to computer crime.” -Wikipedia
Aside: With an emphasis on finishing something before the deadline, hackathons have received some criticism for their encouragement of poorly-written code and unhealthy sleeping and eating habits.
Thanks to Dan Friedman, Torehan, Nancy Xiao, Geoffrey Vedernikoff, Kyle J. Summers, Nate West, Seth Kontny, Brian Cloutier, and Daniel Borowski.
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