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Worst Hackathon ? When you have coded so hard during 48 hours to have a functional prototype and the winners get trophee with a static PowerPoint, full of bullshit buzzwords...10
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I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.
In the offline event:
1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.
2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.
3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.
4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).
5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<
6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.
7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.
All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.
Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)
Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.15 -
- Everything works 10 minutes before presentation
- Nothing works on presentation
- Cry myself in toilet after presentation9 -
I was once at a hackathon and got into a team with some people out of the same company. They brought all of their fancy tools with them, which no one understood except for them.
They ended up doing all of the back-end and I designed a f***** logo, some slides and bored myself to death for the remaining 18 hours or so.3 -
Had a team with
1 entrepreneur who has this great billion dollar Idea and want me to sign an NDA before he can share the idea
1 newb who thinks that X language is the coolest because that's what everyone on Hacker news says
1 person who spends more time with other team than yours. I'll be fortunate to even spot him during the hackathon. Aka, "networking guy"
And then there's me, wondering why was I even here in the first place
Oh wait, that's the every hackathon I've been to.7 -
3 people for developing the prototype including me.
One person knows unity. He started modeling the terrain in that.
Another person knows 3D modelling. He started designing the bots.
I don't know unity or C#. I started implementing the logic :/
It was the worst experience but learned shitloads from it in 2 days.3 -
Worst hackaton? The one when i realized too late i was stuck with a bunch of kids bragging about being "devs" because they knew how to download an html template for wordpress 😭8
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No, actually, there was this other hackathon I attended. The hackathon itself went pretty damn good. But as for the "experience", it was full of regrets.
You see, I was working on it for ~36 hours straight with the team. It was held in a warehouse sorta building. Weird place. But I lived nearby. So I finally thought (around 2AM) fuck it I'm going home for a quick nap, and went home. When I returned around 3-4 hours later, no one was there (even other teams). They all started to come back at around 7am all drunk, sweaty, and happy. Then I found out what happened. Apparently, there was a bondage themed party going on downstairs. And around the time I left, the girls and guys came up, saw a bunch of devs, and invited them all to the party. AND I MISSED IT!!! 😭2 -
My study organises a hackathon (12 pm to the next 12 pm so 24 hours total) every year and doesn't allow to bring your own coffee machine. Last year, the teachers machine was used but it's so freaking slow (produces one pot an hour or so) that we could hardly get any. Then, at the early night, it broke down. Everyone was going pretty insane without caffeine for that timespan haha. (Loads of people didn't bring energy drink because 'coffee at location' xD)
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My first two hackathons I didn't participate as coder but as staff, because I didn't have team neither considered myself ready for it, I swore it was never going to happen again. Never again was I going to be on the sidelines watching everybody else code.8
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When 3/4 of my team gave up and left halfway through. I still don't understand how we ended up with a working prototype in the end.
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Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).
I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.
From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)
You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.3 -
Don't remind me of that hackathon 😑 My advice: don't go there without being prepared, team wise, tool wise and skill wise. And whatever happens, don't forget to have fun.1
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Never been to one.
I'm firmly opposed to the idea of sacrificing sleep and free time just to show everyone how awesome and creative I am.3 -
Yes, I have got one to tell. I went to a hackathon where they started the hackathon with a spiritual speech and prayer. They didn't provide any WiFi, food, etc.
There was a canteen in the campus, which got closed in the evening by 7 o clock. The timings were not announced before so we worked whole night with empty stomach. Did I mention one was not allow to go outside the campus during the hackathon? And yes one was not allowed to order food from outside.4 -
When me and my team put all efforts into making a functional app and the top 3 winners only had a PowerPoint with wireframes of their app.
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Two day hackathon. Flaky internet connection for 1.5 days. Winner comes with a prebuilt backend, and just writes an app to connect and show data from there.2
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Worst hackathon experience? Going to one where you must only use app inventor 2 and my team didnt know jackshit, no understanding and rest or anything else, then in the end another team did something similar to us, so during presentation they thought we somehow copied them, we lost terribly, never again.1
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Worst Hackathon experience:
Taking an API built by a junior dev team with minimal specs and "hacking for two pointless days" to make it work in production...
The whole Hackathon idea was an experiment to see if they could make the dev team stay late if they bought pizza and said "have fun".
We all spent 2 days cursing at the shoddy tools and lamenting that you can't run a Hackathon with a single directive and "production ready goal" yet remove any choice the developers have to actually contribute.1 -
Worst Hackathon Experience ever!
Had been to SAP for a hackathon last year. Built a complete solution for our challenge. Due to no sleep and 48 hours of non stop coding, my team mate who was supposed to present our solution screwed it up in the last minute. Now we blame ourselves for losing because of our bad presentation. -
My first hackathon, I was the only one that knew coding, the rest of the people where copy and paste from Google. After spending 2 hours I decided to step out and never return back.
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Yes, they given all of us plastic chairs for sitting 36 hr instead of been bag. Wow you can imagine the condition of our back. They also don't know the password which they created for guest...
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That I've never been able to attend a hackathon since they are ALL always on the weekend. I'm Jewish and can't use electronics on the Sabbath FFS6
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first was with people who wanted to host a hackathon. no one even coded a simple hello world application. not even tried to google it with the free internet access available. second time was only one other developer and myself with a bunch of people wanting to claim their fame. pitching alot of ideas but none wanted to do the hard graft.
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Worst "hackathon" turned out to be the boss (scrum master type) and a Magento guy (super OCD) working on a tiny tiny adjustment to a email template. They didn't really do anything and expected me to just make it all way better with CSS alone. I built out a robust responsive email in a codepen for them. They acted like they couldn't trust me to be a part of the team because I wasn't contributing - but I wasn't even sure what was happening. Between gathering refreshments and patting themselves on the back... it was hard to see what they had done. The online presentation to the magento people was pretty funny to watch though. If you think you can't have a presentation about nothing - think again. Magento is totally fucked. The word 'hacking' is not really suited to describe 'programming websites/applications quickly' anyway. 'Ninja' and 'hack' should always be considered red flags. 'Magento' should be a triple red flag: Jerk-off Jesus-complex boss, self-centered out of touch programmers, crap product. Watch out!1
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Best: come up with best idea to real world problem.
Worst: lose to teams who used all the sensors in the kit.... Their system didn't even solve a problem. -
48 hours hackathon, Before 20 min everything working good and fine. Finishing touch and everything breaks. Finally, fixed 5 min prior to presentation start. Panicked to toes, were asked to present first. Result: Runners up. Hell yeah.
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Insufficient food which caused many of us to go out to find some. Unfortunately most shops are closed on weekends and I ended up went home and continued my hack at home.
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Never got a bad experience. The only bad part I could think of is I'm the youngest and always solo coding all the time. It's pretty fun tho.
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During my first hackathon I teamed up with some strangers. We decided to create some games by expanding reality with virtual element (sounds mysteriously and maybe even ominously, but it's not). So here we go - one of them started building android app, the second guy started building window app in C++ and the last one of them decided to create something in JavaScript. It was fun, but I wasn't prepared and so much educated, so after some trials that ended poorly, the only thing I did was the wooden construction that was supposed to hold our tablet up so it could shoot photos recursively. I almost died of boredom for the remaining time.
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Probably that one time we lost to a shitty app that was of no use to the community and literally scammed the opinion of the jury.
Their concept was a webapp that would suggest a room to study to a student on our campus. It was called "is it free/vacant" but should've been called "is it open" since there is no way of knowing how many seats are occupied, etc.
The jury was amazed, the app was worthless, literally 15 minutes of coding, presentation had a shit ton of buzz words like "were using mongodb to store the classrooms", was just fucking horrible
On the same competition a guy tried to enter his company that was developing the Facebook page managing app for Windows phone, already having a working app and making revenue from it for at least a year lol
We still got second place, but it was a really disappointing second place, shit was rigged yo1 -
Attending in a local game jam with some friends.
One of the team members wrote the worst code I've ever seen. After him realizing that it's buggy as hell he left to sleep having me fixing his mess at 4 am to somehow get something done by the end of the event.
It resulted in me rewriting nearly everything he had done.
Guess which team didn't manage to have something playable in the end...1 -
A hackathon sponsored by two brands, the topic was to create smth cool with their APIs (either of them, they were to pick a winner each). We got a little too ambitious and tried to use both, ended up messing everything up and nothing to show. They loved our idea though :|
PS: Somehow the winner was a crappy flappy bird clone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯2 -
More people have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet. More than 60 prototype solutions were built in response to 113 water sector challenges defined.....Shiit!! Risk is falling asleep at a hackathon- especially when there are permanent maker pens around.
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In the first one, the group would just not get to agree at something, they'd spend hours talking about an approach.
First times, I was like "Hey, why don't we do this?", they began to argue and half an hour later, they agreed to whatever I said in the first place (they didn't acknowledge what I said and they tell me they came with the solution and that I didn't say anything)
Fucking shit, if only they listened in the first time. -
Attend a global game jam with my cousin who is kinda lazy and is looking for girls. I find a good Unity developer and make him join our team. He coded and I helped for everything he needed for looking for music, graphics etc at the end he presented it and claimed all the credit
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The worst, and only, hackaton I ever attended was at a conference a few years back.
My boss told me to attend. So I did.
The hackaton was clearly not something the conference had planned very well, as the info was late one day before the conference dinner party - and the summary was early the morning after the party. -
Not a bad experience per say, but it was the only one I have been to so far...
Went to a hackaton with my friend for the Amazon Alexa and we were asked to create a skill in 30 minutes.
My friend and I had never used JavaScript or the Alexa API but we came up with the idea of having Alexa respond with a voice clip of Larry David saying "pretttay prettay good" from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Unfortunately we couldn't get the error regex or something thing on Alexa to recognise video URLs but we still likely our idea 🙃 -
Worst hackathon? My second one, it was a hackathon competition I went to with school. A friend and me entered the js competition. Because of our bus being late, we started almost an hour after everyone else. So everyone else was way more ahead of us which gave us not only a disadvantage but also more stress. At the end we were pretty satisfied with our results but we knew we could've made it waay better in the details if we had an hour extra. Anyway, we came in second... major disappointment.1
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Joined a hackathon for an app which requires a server to help parse a few things and send push notifications. Looked up Google push notifications and it seemed decent so I just bookmarked it and left it there for reference during the hackathon. Biiigggg mistake. No idea how to implement the server, couldn't find a tutorial that explains enough for a newbie like me and the Google site didn't help much either. Welp. Google cloud messaging. Never gonna like those words ever.1
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Being so damn lazy to even attend one. And I don't really like that it's kind of a competiton. These things, sadly, tend to lure morons, which in the end means that you spend sitting in front of a pc with complete strangers without any motivation.
Or am I only being pessimist too much? -
Wasn't really a hackathon but it fits into it (I guess). This year's WCEU had a full day for working on WordPress stuff. I was really looking forward to it but when I was there the people just used this to communicate with the original extension developers about their specific code problems at their companies and I was just like what the fuck? I then joined a team who wanted to do something they needed for a specific case and requested that code to be merged to the plugin. When I tried to give some input they just were like yeah ok and ignored it.3
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When you get paged by your company to help investigate and fix critical issue in production and don't get time to work on the hackathon.
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Can't really complain about hackathons, they've been great to me. Worked with new technology every time, so I've always taken massive positives every time.
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