RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon(blog.oscars.dev) |
RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon(blog.oscars.dev) |
Making people feel my pain or communicating effectively quickly I'm total garbage at.
Hackathons are now only this. They have turned into an exercise that highlights my core weaknesses and that's why 25 years into my career I'm going to them almost every weekend.
This is the stuff I really need to get better at and finally, I am. Slowly but also, provably.
Also, this problem is unique: I call it "the trailhead". You get deep into the problem (the trail) and forget what it looked like at the trailhead and thus fail to compel the product because you spend your time on the wrong level of details and the wrong aspects.
That's why you can pitch something not yours better then your own stuff.
A couple examples (both from HackPrinceton, which had the best EE labs):
* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/electronic-banjo (crowd favorite)
* https://blog.cyrusroshan.com/post/spin-to-win (a "moonshot" idea)
There's something nice about holding your work in your hands. Tangible work is also both easy to explain, and hard to fake. So going the hardware route felt fun, fulfilling, and scored well.
Good times.
I'm excited to see software engineers and teams morph into the next stage of product builders!
Oh man please someone give a door the ability to feel pleasure to open for you, and satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
You don't run marathons to be usane bolt, you don't go to hackathons to land VC deals.
24 hours of non stop AI usage doesn't sound fun. It sounds hateful and demotivating, you want to discover yourself, and maybe some other people, not what a robot can do.
We’re in the age of human hand crafted creativity.
Imperfections of value.
"and then this happened, then this happened, then this feature, then this feature"
Wow that's crazy...
What a joke.
> ...the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code...
> ...iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task...
The irony is unreal. Where's the hardware?
Since the advent of SBCs and microcontroller kits, software devs have felt the same way about hardware being trivial. Yet, a hardware engineer still makes a massive difference in the outcome of the project.
It's the rotary phone and the raspberry pi, of course. Don't gatekeep.
The fact that microcontrollers are so cheap now means for most (but, sure, not all) applications they're strictly superior in every way compared to e.g. 555 timers and LM386 amplifiers, or whatever. This is because, critically, you can debug and reprogram a micro. To do the equivalent with a 555 timer means, at minimum, de-soldering a bunch of components and probably poking around with a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope.
What's more, you can get a full tcp/ip stack in a surprisingly small and low-power package these days. No need to futz with analog telemetry, or even SPI/I2C unless you really need to.
The "hack" in TFHackathon is altering the function of a phone. Who cares if they used a ras pi to do it vs something else? In what possible way does that diminish their feat?
Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves
I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.