[iwtbf]

Last summer when I was an intern I totally bought the hackathon culture. Then I went to one and was absolutely appalled at what goes on inside hackathons. Big talks about the next cool app, and raising money from VC coz I went to Y school and know Z. One of the apps that won was a chat app for hackers in 2014. There were some good people too, but they were hard to find and very few. Since then I have started moving away from the so-called hacker culture and just ignore hackathons. Fundamentally the whole concept of hackathon just sounds bad to me now. You code and don't sleep or sleep in some random place at random time. I would take good sleep any day over learning some fancy new technology. I would prefer hackathons to be more where a set of people show something interesting they have built and then people can discuss merits/demerits and start contributing to them. Sprints of open source projects comes to mind. The likes scikit-learn under python for example.