Over the weekend part of the AddonList team attended the AngelHack event in San Francisco @ the Hattery.

Simply put, hackathons are the best way to improve as a ‘product’ person. If you are a developer, designer, or product manager you should attend some sort of time-boxed app development event at least once a year.

Inside the box

It does not really matter if the subject of the hackathon is mobile, web, or hardware. The important quality of a hackathon is the strict timebox. In the real world there is always tomorrow. In a hackathon there simply isn’t. Tomorrow allows for features to creep and deadlines to slide. Not having this luxury forces you to gain focus and distill your ideas into their simplest form. Skills that are equally valuable outside of a hackathon.

Feedback built-in

Getting good feedback on your product can be hard. Be it office politics, group think or just friends wanting to say your doing a good job—feedback often gets skewed. At a hackathon you are surrounded by people who are all working towards the same goal but are basically strangers. In this space constructive criticism is far more easy to come by. Moreover, there is a formal judging at the end. So there is no doubt how you preformed over the last 24 or 48 hours.