Welcome the Craftathon, Move aside Hackathon.
Hackathon have been a staple to the coding industry over the last decade. My first coding job use to hold an annual event of teams going head to head to impress the powers that be in a single Thursday-Friday. Pizza was supplied and sleeping bags were for the weak in an all night effort to prove yourself as the ultimate hacker. It was cool, it was fun, we got to play with new tech and more importantly we got to impress the impressible.
Something about the term ‘hack’ always rubbed me the wrong way, visions of cutting through 6' grass fields with a machete sprang to mind. Who were we impressing with our hacking? I remember a conversation I had with a PM when he was asking me about a ticket I was working on. Why does this take you a day to do this when you managed to build an entire app in the same amont. Was it because the work wasn’t fun so I didn’t work as fast?! I explained that it was because the quality wasn’t as good, although he was aware the features weren’t all there and it was a bit buggy I don’t think he truely understood or for that matter really cared what I meant by quality.
The reality is Hackerthons are more damaging than they are good. They build unrealistic expectations of developers. Quantity trumps quality and the end result is all that matters. Why would anyone want to jeapordise there professional integrity for free pizza and maybe a prize at the end. I can’t think of any other industry where craftsman sell their profession as cheaply as we do.
Hackerthons do have there place. I held a private hackathon with a few freinds of mine to work on his buisness idea. We were all on board with the idea but none of us truely had a concrete grasp of what the idea would be so we spent 24 hours hacking it together. This gave us a tangible product and allowed us to answer a few questions about what his idea truely was. Aside from this use case for a hackathon I don’t really see where it fits it.
Welcome the craftathon. A few months back my collegue Sanjay and Will at Makers Academy held an event where the aim of the game was to produce well crafted code. Fully tested and best practices to the best of the coders ability were the only critiera. Some produced fully featured applications and others only a few classes but the results were 100% test coverage and the winner was judged by the team who produced the code with the most amount of features and followed best practices.
An advantage of this kind of craftathon is similar to a kata. Imbedding the need for craft in your application. If you can build a small well crafted application in a day then you’re on the right path to building a sustainable application in your profession.
So I think if you want to spend an amount of time coding for pizza and prizes do it with your integrity in tact and craft your way to a sleep deprived obesity.
