I've been to many hackathons and also organized a few, and this is one of the most soulless incarnations of a hackathon I've seen.
In my opinion on of the coolest things about a hackathon is the ability to live out your creativity and be free from perfectionsim to have a change of pace from your traditional day-job in software engineering, so we've also always tried to enable that when organizing. Eliminating that by providing preformulated ideas like this here proposes kills that at the root. They state that they do that in order to prevent everyone from picking the same idea, but there are good other measures to do that like having a scoring system that factors in creativity (and penalizing people working on the same idea).
(not saying they’re all like this of course. But a lot were)
There weren't prizes, it was just about getting ~100 devs into a discord for a week and seeing what happened. Most people who stayed involved posted an update once a day or so and as people wrote blog posts or published a project I added it to the hack week page.
I'm looking forward to doing more in the future on topics like compression algorithms or emulators or CPython internals.
I'd also love to see more companies doing hackathons not just about using their product but implementing minimal versions. How better to find out how devs perceive your product, let alone a chance to teach your community and identify potential hires! If you want to try this I'd be happy to chat with you about my experience!
Having been through a couple of Hackathons, rest assured that there are plenty of Hackathons that are more focused on the business case rather than the implementation. I've seen hackathons won by teams that didn't write a single line of code. It was all mocked up in Powerpoint or similar.
It does feel like frabricating/buying github activity with money… but it also does feel like I can't argue that they are doing something with malicious intent…
You can frame plenty github projects with this logic, at the end the community also benefits.
I really don’t like the gamification of GitHub stars. It feels like abuse from marketing departments
