It seems like you're being sarcastic, since the hackathon took place in the past and, therefore, signing up is no longer a possibility. Despite the exhaustive observations you surely made while not attending the event, I find your insinuation that only teams of back end developers have the qualifications required to organize hackathons to be facile and, frankly, untenable.
I think that the founders came from heterogenous backgrounds is, in fact, a positive thing. Part of the point of the hackathon was to create an environment that values different perspectives. The fact that the organizers have experienced the tech scene from avenues other than coding gives them different perspectives, which, all other things being equal, is probably a good thing.
Perhaps all else is not equal, but I'm not convinced. I volunteered at the hackathon. The hacks were quite good and--possibly more importantly--the atmosphere was phenomenal. People worked and played well together, and a number of individuals made comments to me along the lines of the following:
- I feel really comfortable working at this hackathon.
- This hackathon is really well-organized.
- I appreciate that this hackathon doesn't require me to do unreasonable things like sleep in this office, or not sleep at all, or expect me to do tequila shots like other hackathons.
I'm sure a team of 4 back-end devs or 4 startup CEOs could have put together a similarly great hackathon. But is that sort of team composition a necessary condition for the event to have been a success? No.
Reladtedly, how funny/sad/appropriate is it that in a discussion involving the exclusion of females from the tech community, someone would protest that teams composed of non-developers should be excluded from organizing hackathons?
Hackathon is about technology not about building products. The cancer that has infected the tech industry has bastardized the word. Prototyping something with bootstrap, rails and sqllite is now a hackathon and focus is more on design than technology. I bet there were more designers,marketers, product people than devs at this hackathon. Afterward the demos are built, the cancer(marketing/pr/sales/product people) will ask the developers to build the real product and offer such awesome terms like working for free for two months and getting 5% in RSUs.
Developers need to learn, they don't need these leaches. If you're the original developer and not getting over 30% of the equity, you're getting fucked.
sure, having four devs organize this event would have been nice for credibility, but they wouldn't have necessarily throw a better hackathon just by being devs.
there's a learning curve to throwing good hackathons, just like with anything else. we talked to a ton of people before this event, including devs and other hackathon organizers, read every best practice we could find, and solicited a lot feedback from our attendees. sure, we made some mistakes (demos need to be queued up a la TC, peoples choice award needs to be fail-safe), but we'll fix them moving forward.
I think that the founders came from heterogenous backgrounds is, in fact, a positive thing. Part of the point of the hackathon was to create an environment that values different perspectives. The fact that the organizers have experienced the tech scene from avenues other than coding gives them different perspectives, which, all other things being equal, is probably a good thing.
Perhaps all else is not equal, but I'm not convinced. I volunteered at the hackathon. The hacks were quite good and--possibly more importantly--the atmosphere was phenomenal. People worked and played well together, and a number of individuals made comments to me along the lines of the following: - I feel really comfortable working at this hackathon. - This hackathon is really well-organized. - I appreciate that this hackathon doesn't require me to do unreasonable things like sleep in this office, or not sleep at all, or expect me to do tequila shots like other hackathons.
I'm sure a team of 4 back-end devs or 4 startup CEOs could have put together a similarly great hackathon. But is that sort of team composition a necessary condition for the event to have been a success? No.
Reladtedly, how funny/sad/appropriate is it that in a discussion involving the exclusion of females from the tech community, someone would protest that teams composed of non-developers should be excluded from organizing hackathons?