Intro to Hackathoning

Adventures at “the learning hackathon”, HackPSU

“You don’t need any coding experience—just come and we’ll teach you to make an app in a weekend.”

That was my mantra for the nearly dozen classes I visited in the past week. I was practically begging complete strangers to follow me on a journey to HackPSU, the hackathon for “newbies”. Part of me was desperately trying to expose more University of Pennsylvania students to how insanely fun hackathons are, but part of me was also trying to fill a bus to Penn State that I had over-confidently declared I needed.

In the end, we managed to recruit about a dozen Penn students (and a few more from the Philadelphia area) who were fairly new to coding and didn’t know the wonders of hackathoning yet. In order to live up to our crazy promises, my friend and fellow PennApps Executive Board member Alex Hu (who learned to code a few mere months ago) came up with a list of topics to teach and a timeframe for teaching them for our “lesson plan”.

We started the learning almost immediately after arriving on campus. Alex and I divided up the group and taught them basic Unix and HTML. (Unix is a basic skill that allows programmers to navigate their own computers and download necessary components to work in other languages, and HTML is the basic language of the web.) They worked for a while on their own, approaching us with questions, but mostly using awesome tutorials online to learn the necessary syntax. As Alex put it: “I’ve never seen people so eager to put themselves through Code Academy tutorials for hours.”

I would have been happy if the group walked away at that point, learning the skills I deemed “transitioned you from being someone who knows Java to a real programmer, the type that actually gets our bizarre command-line jokes.” Instead we trudged on, with me giving lessons (frequently multiple of the same one to different people, since I think one-on-one mentoring is generally the way to go) on all of the following: Unix, Vim, Javascript, Node.js, HTML, Bootstrap, Git, and SQL. I was constantly up and down, jumping at a chance to introduce the group to something I had only been introduced to in the past year. During the breaks, I worked through the introductory “Hello World” tutorials for Ruby on Rails, Chrome extensions, and the Youtube API.

So, it’s Sunday morning (nearly the end!), and how did we manage to do? Sadly, none of our teams managed to finish apps. There was one team that got quite close to completion, and they were overheard vehemently claiming that they’d go to a hackathon in two weeks to make a finished product.

Even so, I can’t help but think it was a success. We managed to take a group from “newbies” in our introductory programming class to programmers with more languages on their lists of skills than the number of hours it took us to drive here. At HackPSU, the competition wasn’t about who could make the most novel or technically difficult app, but who could pick up the most new skills and get the most out of the mentors and tutorials.

Last night, I was walking back into the room we were holed up in to whispers of “there she is!”. I gave the group a questioning look, and one of them spoke up, “we were just saying that this was a complete waste of a weekend.” A distraught look swept over my face, and I retreated to my failure corner in the darkest, coldest part of the building—but it was just a joke. What were they really just talking about?

“I’ve never learned more in a 24-hour span in my entire life.”