Someone bursts through the door and announces, “There’s pizza!” Nearby, a team has duct tape and cardboard holding its prototype together. Another is debugging a model that won’t detect their movements.
This is a common scene during hackathons, and for a lot of people they’re the place to learn to build.
During several recent hackathons, we followed dozens of participants from the badge line to final demos and asked them what keeps them coming back.
Two days of intense focus
Teams come up with ideas for robots, apps, websites, hardware, and more, then try to get prototypes working before time runs out.
These aren’t small things, these are big endeavors, and they’re going to try to do it in basically two days.
Kyle, hackathon participant
Yana describes it as two days of intense focus on one small experimental project that moves the needle forward. For Nithya, it’s a rare chance to work as hard as you can on something you’re proud of.
It is basically an invention marathon.
Mike, hackathon participant
You don’t need a computer science degree
For most of computing history, building software required years of specialized training. Not anymore: with AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, natural language is becoming a universal programming language, and anyone with an idea can start turning it into working code.
Lance’s team hit a problem at the very last minute. They needed a news API so people could fact-check the information they were getting.
GitHub Copilot was able to not only create a frontend in 30 minutes but also connects with the actual API itself and integrates it all together.
Lance, hackathon participant
When they’re paired up with someone that’s a CS major, or when they just go and use AI to start a prototype and convince others to join in on their idea, it’s giving this autonomy for people to do what they’re most passionate about.
Kyle
The pizza is free, so are the new skills
Call it a learning event, Jon says, and people might not want to go. But tell them there’s pizza, and they’ll show up anyway, and they’ll still end up learning.
Jon calls it the best educational experience you can get as a technologist. Sarvesh puts it more simply: it’s a better way to learn.
Eric calls hackathons a huge grind of continuous work and continuous debugging. Vaishnavi’s team spent part of the time fighting a model that couldn’t detect their movements. “Like, nothing is working,” Vaishnavi said at one point. Mayank’s team got there through trial and error, with duct tape and cardboard.
Hackathons are a safe third place. It’s okay to fail and experiment. You’re not going to get an F, you’re not going to get fired over it.
Mike
Friendships of practice
Niels once searched Google to find out who came up with the term “hackathon,” and his own name came up. He doesn’t remember coining it, but he does remember setting laptops down wherever there was space, sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags, and going straight back to hacking after waking up.
If you feel you have to do it and you don’t like the people around you, then you’re missing the point.
Niels, hackathon participant
Akankshya found everyone open to collaborating and never felt pushed to quit or leave. Shehmeer could turn to the person on either side and ask how to do something. If they didn’t know, they usually knew someone there who did.
My first hackathon, I met two guys that are now my best friends.
Dev, hackathon participant
Zach has a name for it:
When you meet someone who you bond with over a shared interest, that’s a friendship of practice.
Zach, hackathon participant
Impact that changes lives
Mike’s first hackathon changed the course of his career:
At my first hackathon, I learned more in one weekend than I had in my entire university degree up to that point.
Mike
The next day, Mike looked in the mirror and told himself to forget being a lawyer and become a hacker.
Lee has seen hackathons act as a bridge between the spark of an idea and something rolled out into production. Shehmeer says organizers are trying to show a new generation that building isn’t out of reach.
For Yana, seeing the work happen pulls more people in, because there’s now a bit more of an open door.
You can solve problems yourself, you don’t have to ask someone else for permission.
Zach
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