Love in the time of mega-hackathons
PennApps 2014s is taking a step back and feeling the love
The best hackathon. The biggest hackathon. The top college hackathon. The most epic hackathon ever.
These are just a few of the epithets that college hackathons have given themselves recently. They’re grandiose taglines, and the hackathons have ambitions to match: thousands of people and tens of thousands of dollars in sponsor prizes.
But this growth hasn’t been painless. These hackathons have suffered from stretching themselves logistically (wifi outages, anyone?) as well as cultural questions: Are we focusing too much on winning? Are we nurturing beginners? These questions have been trampled as these “mega-hackathons” have pushed themselves to grow as quickly as possible.
PennApps 2014 Spring is taking a step back, and taking a moment to feel the love. Not your average college hackathon, it proclaims.
First, there is the Valentine’s Day thing. It is, after all, Valentine’s Day, and despite the stereotype of hacker-as-lonesome-nerd, quite a few people have sweethearts that they’re missing today.
To alleviate the sting of spending Valentine’s Day at a programming competition, PennApps has given everything a corny pink twist. The volunteers wear shirts with big magenta hearts; the mentor hats and name tags are a matching shade of pale pink; API demos are punctuated by shouts of “I love you!” Ricky Robinett, a dev evangelist from Twilio, invited the audience to tweet about his affection for his wife, who he’d left in New York.
The PennApps team has put together a PennApps Admirers page, where people can express their affection for one another. The comments range from silly (“den den is da best!”) to sincere (“I really liked the API demos this year. You guys did a great job and the APIs were awesome”). This project—and indeed, this theme—can be dangerous in an industry fraught with sexism, but the PennApps team has a seasoned, responsible leader in Brynn Claypoole, its Director, and they’ll certainly handle everything gracefully.
The whole thing is corny, and yet it’s also fitting: PennApps, the hackathon on Valentine’s Day, in the City of Brotherly Love, is inviting everyone to step back and… love each other.
Andrew Kortina, the co-founder of Venmo, gives a speech at every PennApps event. When I say every PennApps event, I mean it—he’s given a speech twice a year since 2011. In the past, his speeches have trended around the same themes: build something your friends would use, build something you love, build something you’re passionate about.
This year, he’s talking about monks.
More specifically, he’s talking about monks and their sand art—which they spend weeks creating only to ceremonially destroy later—and, in the context of this, the concept of flow. “Flow” is a state where a person is completely immersed and focused on their work. You hit flow when your level of challenge meets your level of competence. Flow is a the ultimate feeling of productivity and satisfaction.
So what does this have to do with PennApps?
“What’s cool about PennApps as a way to learn is that it really creates an environment that challenges you in a variety of ways and facilitates flow,” Kortina said. “You have a very small amount of time to focus—48 hours—that creates flow. Using a new technology… that creates flow. And then competition, that’s one way to make flow.”
And the sand art?
“If you were going to throw away what you built today, how would you approach this hackathon? And how would you really enjoy the experience of learning and building and flow?”
Not your average college hackathon, indeed.
It’s not just Valentine’s Day, and it’s not just the monks. PennApps has also moved from Irvine Auditorium (the university’s largest auditorium, which can hold a couple thousand people) to the Penn Museum. It’s a smaller space—we all fit, though snugly—and it’s a more communal space. We all sit on one level, in a round rotunda, and sitting there, I get the sense that this is a community.
