[lettergram]

I know myself and a large group of students constantly avoid going to hackathons because it teaches you to:

(1) Focus on short sighted goals

(2) reinforce "hacks" as opposed to well engineered code

(3) Not build long lasting projects

I spend 6 - 12 hours a day coding everyday (weekends and all), and I produce (in my opinion) really cool stuff. Producing a quality, bug free, code requires a program to be dynamic, and usually takes weeks to months to code properly. My goal is always to implement a new function every day, one 25 line max function. I actually learn more being consistent, as opposed to being exhausted and hardcoding an address.

I actually (sorry) hate working with the hackathon types, some can code really well in a pinch, but in the end they usually are not reliable and bugs usually go uncorrected. There was a post yesterday about the final 10% of a program being left incomplete, and that's where I feel hackathon types have a tendencies to leave.

[ethanbond]

I agree with this, but I think those are important skills to have; they just shouldn't be your only skills or even your default skills.