[empressplay]

I gave up on "hackathons" when I went to three in a row whose winners never wrote a single line of code during the actual event, and instead spent the whole weekend working on their pitches.

I protested (because I tend to do that) but my concerns fell on deaf ears. The organisers didn't see anything wrong with spending the weekend building a pitch rather than a product. It was all about whatever it took to impress the judges -- and the judges were all entrepreneurs with their own pump-and-dump style startups, so they weren't really all that tech-savvy and weren't impressed by technical innovation.

Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a place for pitch-a-thon events but that's what they are -- create a 'kick-ass concept' -- not about technical hacking, and don't make that mistake.

[mkal_tsr]

I remember when hackathons were all about "here's some buggy code I wrote that does random/obscure feature/task X because look at how cool that is" and not "look at this pitch/product I'm trying to make to earn prize Y" Shame those days seem to be fading into obscurity.