[zem]

as someone who got into linux and open source in the early 90s I will never stop being sad that "hackathon" morphed into a competitive activity, rather than "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively". I guess the latter tends to get called a "dev sprint" these days, but it's always the first thing I think of when I hear "hackathon"

[yardie]

I grew up going to hackathons and they were fairly open ended and collaborative. The recent hackathons I've attended are just a vehicle to get you to use cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Vercel, etc).

More recently, teams have been attending hackathons with an already completed product, using the event to attend VC meetings instead of doing any hacking. And when they invariably win with a well done, complete product they use the media announcements to generate leads. My duct-tape and cardboard hack doesn't look very good but we designed and built it within the team we assembled 48hours ago.

[adfm]

You are not alone. MBAs found APIs. Eternal September and all that.

[aquariusDue]

I think organizations like KDE (during the Akademy) and LibreOffice still run those during the last day of their conferences?

I had the chance to attend the LibreOffice one back in 2023 but life got in the way and I missed it sadly.

[matthewfcarlson]

Agreed- the idea of "winning" a hackathon seems kind of wild to me. It doesn't seem like something you should be able to win.

[moffkalast]

Practically all corporate backed or organized ones are more or less lots of job interview tasks running in parallel, so they get lots of work for free on a problem they really should've paid people to solve, and get to pick the result they like most. I've always found the idea too exploitative to ever join.

[christoph]

I went to a London one once and this was totally my impression of it. The free beer and food was a drop in the bucket for what the massive corporate got out of it at the end.

[komali2]

> "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively".

G0v hackathons in Taiwan are still this, at the end everyone presents what they worked on and there's no judging or anything. Some of the projects have been going for years.

There was a hackathon two weeks ago, you can see all the videos from all the demos here https://m.youtube.com/@g0vTW

They happen every two months. Some people have started g0v chapters abroad, maybe you could consider it for your region!