Hackathons

What I’ve learned from 1,000 hackathons

Recently I was invited to talk at FirstMark Capital’s CTO Summit about hackathons. I shared some of my (negative) feelings about internal hackathons and offered some ideas about how to both sponsor and throw external events.

I‘m Richard, I’ve been working on hackathons since 2007 and I started the in-person hackathon business at Devpost, which is now used at around 80% of the world’s hackathons. That means since 2013, we’ve powered over 1500 in person events. Today I’m going to tell you what hackathons are and how to use them most effectively to identify top talent and connect with developers.

A Little About Devpost and Our Role

Devpost was founded in 2009 and our mission is to help developers find fulfilling work. We do that by both providing a hackathon platform and connecting developers to companies looking to hire them. For hackathons our product helps hackers find all the information they need, communicate and most importantly showcases all the projects created. We’re used by everyone from Uber & White House to TechCrunch and 95% of colleges.

Today’s Agenda

Today I’m going to give you an overview of hackathons, help you understand some of the benefits you can receive from engaging with them.

After that I’ll give you a rapid 101 class on organizing an in-person hackathon.

Let’s get started…

Definition and topology of hackathons

For the purpose of this talk I’m going to define a hackathon as an initiative that gathers developers together with the objective of building and having fun.

The target audience can be internal or external to your organizations and the event can be in-person (usually over 24–36 hours) or online (often over several months).

Internal Vs. External

This is likely the first critical decision you have to make when thinking about hackathons. My strong advice to you is don’t do internal hackathons.

I’m not discounting that some companies have had successes with internal hackathon.

However, most of objectives that business leaders have when throwing internal hackathons are better served by other means. For example I’ve often heard people say “We’re doing this to excite and engage our team” — which to me makes the hackathon sound like a bandaid over a larger problem. Another popular justification is “we want a way for our developers to contribute ideas” — do you really need a special event for your developers to contribute ideas?

The truth is that high functioning development teams usually already include the best elements of hackathons. People are creative, goal focused, working well together and having fun. The only difference at a hackathon is the extreme time pressure — which I don’t think is an advisable way of running your team day to day.

The Value of External Engagement

Now that I’ve talked you out of internal hackathons, let’s turn our attention to external hackathons, as these are what will get you the best results. When I talk about external hackathons I mean events that seek to engage people outside of your organization. However, I definitely do want to encourage you to encourage your team to participate in these events.

Simply put, external engagement will bring new ideas, new perspectives and energy to your company.

Let me break down what hackathons can do…

What are hackathons good for?

Hackathons are used for a variety of purposes. Here are some common ones:

Online Vs. In-person Hackathons

In-person and online hackathons are both highly effective, but they serve different use cases.

Online hackathons focus less on community building and meeting developers. Instead they specialize in driving adoption of products and services. If you want more fully built products using your API — they are the way to go.

In-person events are fun and are better used to achieve goals related to hiring and community building.

For today’s talk I’m going to focus on in-person events.

Talent, Hiring and Hackathons

Hiring is one of the key reasons companies get involved in the hackathon world — and it’s a great idea. Hackathons attract some of the most creative and passionate developers you will ever encounter. These are the people who give up their weekends to spend time learning, pushing themselves and surrounded by other developers.

Also, at both college and post-college level developers attending hackathons are looking for employment opportunities.

Recently, when Devpost asked our community, as part of the launch of recruiting product 80% replied that they wanted to hear about job opportunities.

Getting involved in the hackathon community offers you not only the chance to meet these developers, but to work side by side with them. See how they interact on a team, solve problems and what their passions are.

Getting Started in the World of Hackathons

Assuming I’ve got you interested in the world of hackathons you now have some simple choices to make. Do you throw your own hackathon or sponsor an events? Here is a simple framework for for making that choice.

Sponsoring — great way to interface with the college hackathon world.

Organize — great for meeting developers, branding, feedback and building community.

How to Sponsor a Hackathon

I could talk for hours about how to sponsor hackathons, and I’ll leave you with some resources to follow up. Including some sources for finding great events to support. Here is the Cliff’s Notes version:

"Don’t sponsor a hackathon unless you can send team members from your company to attend. Give those people the specific instructions to help as many hackers as possible. Helping hackathon attendees solve their problems is by far the most effective way of making your presence felt at the event."

Can I really throw a hackathon?

This is one of the most common questions I get from companies thinking about hackathons.

Throwing a hackathon is easier than you think and there are a number of resources to help you. Start by looking within your own team. If you have developer evangelists, throwing hackathons are almost certainly within their skill set. If not, look for colleagues who are involved in the technology community with Meetups and other developer events, it’s quite possible someone would love to throw a hackathon. With an organizer selected the next step is to secure space for the event — think comfort, WiFi and safety for your attendees.

I want to address the issue of using a 3rd party to organize your hackathon. Using an event planner to help with the hackathon production can be helpful, but it often unnecessary. However, out-sourcing the throwing of your hackathon is an extremely bad idea. Hackers attending the event will associate it with whoever they consider to be doing to the ‘work’ during the hackathon. That’s often the person who tells them the WiFi password or answers a submission question rather than the brand on the event.

Throwing a hackathon is about building your connection to the developer community.

Host your hackathon on a weekend. You can either kick off on Friday evening or Saturday morning — aim to have the event wrap up Sunday mid-afternoon. Make ever possible effort to have your venue available through the night, hackers will expect that to be the case. If for some reason it isn’t make sure developers know when they sign up.

If you are organizing in a big city like New York it’s unlikely that it will be the only hackathon that weekend. Try to avoid holiday weekends and weekends around religious holidays. You can also check Devpost.com to get sense of what other hackathons are taking place. I recommend trying to avoid having your hackathon when there is a TechCrunch Disrupt or a large college hackathon taking place in the same city, again that information is available on Devpost.

The golden rule

Always ask yourself — would you want to build software at this event?

How to create a compelling invitation for a hackathon?

Setting the scope of your hackathon is important — what are you inviting developers to do?

Choosing a theme for your hackathon is a great place to start. Recently we’ve seen hackathons like “BrewHacks” sponsored by Anheuser Busch — encouraging people to “reimagine the relationship between beer and people”. That’s a pretty cool theme for a company that doesn’t have an API or SDK for people to use.

If you have an API it’s easy to theme your hackathon around that. Let’s say your API provides two-factor authentication services, you could easily throw the “Two-Factor Hackathon” and challenge developers to create the most interesting implementation.

How to Market your Hackathon

Once you’re invitation is set it’s time to get the word out. A few key resources to use here:

Expect a 30–50% yield on your RSVPs and make sure you keep RSVP’s developers engaged in the run up to the event.

Hackathon Structure 101

Here is a simple hackathon structure…

Pre-event: Get your Devpost site site, post information online, encourage developers to connect, create ideas and form teams.

Getting people to interact ahead of time encourages people to show up and helps the hackathon be productive by people turning up with ideas.

Event Kickoff: No long speeches, share logistical information, introduce the theme and demo any APIs / technologies. Make sure developers know what they are expected to do, how they will be evaluated and where they can get help.

Team Building: Host a simple team building session. Ask everyone in the room “Who doesn’t have a team?”. Get those people who do to gather in a space. Ask “Who has an idea?”, and give those people 30 seconds to quickly explain it. Then ask people to go around and give a quick, less than 10 seconds, summary of their skills. Once people start talking to each other the team building will happen organically.

Bulk of the event: Let people code. Keep them fed with LOTS of healthy food options and make sure there are always drinks available. I would recommend saving the beers for post hackathon and not serving alcohol during the event. Try not to distract he teams. Once they have started working they will be focused on building. So, don’t let me ever see you bring a DJ to a hackathon!

Submissions: Set a deadline at which every team has to submit their project to your Devpost site. This will be your online record of what was created at the event and also provides you with lots of tools for judging. Assume one project for every 4 developers at your event.

Judging: If you have less than 50 projects you can gather the whole event together and have everyone demo. Give the teams 2–3 minutes to demo, setup two projectors so you can quickly switch between teams. Keeping this demo session engaging is key, let teams practice their demos ahead of time and give them advice to help make it the best presentation possible. DO NOT LET TEAMS USE A POWERPOINT, make everyone show what they built.

Remember: People are tired and possibly haven’t slept — help them do the best job possible, but don’t let your judges expect an Apple Keynote.

Once the demos have finished take your judges away to discuss the projects and assign the prizes. Remind the judges that this is a hackathon, projects won’t be polished — have only been created in the last 24 hours and may have every well failed to work!

Event Wrap-up: Celebrate everyone, thank your volunteers, have a good time & get some sleep!

What prizes should we give?

Cash prizes are popular and can be effective — especially for online hackathons. However the most effective prizes for in-person events are both access and validation. When planning your prizes look for things that will both validate a developer’s achievement and give them an opportunity to do more. For example, last summer I organized a quantified self hackathon — the prize was an advanced medical sensor kit that connects to an Arduino. The kit cost around $1k, so significant without being a very costly prize. However, receiving it was cool, it both validates that the developer made something interesting and opens up loads of new opportunities for more hacking.

Prizes that feature mentorship for hackers are also incredibly effective at. Remember everyone is going to hackathons to improve themselves — be part of enabling that.

Maintaining the Post Hackathon Buzz

Hackathons can be pretty tiring for everyone involved, but everyone will be left with a great feeling. Keeping that feeling going is critical to your longer term engagement with the developer community. Here are some tips for how to do that:

Remember that developers love the validation of getting feedback from their peers and showcasing their work.

Also make sure you:

Resources and How I Can Help You

Ok — I feel like we’re crammed a lot of content into this talk! Allow me to recap a little for you…

Also I’ve got resources for you…

post.devpost.com — get access to our free hackathon platform and promotion for your in-person event.

richardsmmurby@gmail.com / @fwdmedia — let me know how I can help

Subscribe to the Devpost newsletter for upcoming hackathons

You can find me upcoming college hackathon via MLH.io — the official league, they will also be happy to help you connect with their events.

Thanks for listening (reading!) & happy hacking.