We Can Help You Hack
Hackathon Insider, Part II: A Glimpse Into PennApps Mentorship
Let’s face it: hackathons can be scary for beginners. Nothing but you, a small kingdom of energy drinks, and that slowly blinking cursor on a freshly installed copy of Sublime Text.
Some people are pretty gifted self-teachers. They can piece together their first functional app by the end of the weekend. But if you’re like me, you’ll spend thirty minutes reading documentation, become overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom, and exile yourself to the snack tables for 36 more hours.
PennApps mentorship is trying to change that.
Hackathons are evolving away from their competitive roots, balancing massive prize pools with new teaching initiatives, and courting both sponsors and talented mentors with equal zeal. That’s pretty special, especially for a field that’s growing as fast as computer science is — both on Penn’s campus and in the job market at large.
At a recent PennApps mentorship meeting, there’s talk of building a comprehensive resource for making your own app. A Wiki of sorts, but focused and streamlined, with an emphasis on efficiency. It’s different, some of board members note, than a Javascript primer or intro to Python (although those are pretty important, too). They want to focus on making finished products: an iOS app, working Chrome extension, or practical API interface. Projects that, to beginners, can seem hopelessly complex, with multiple components that sometimes interact in intricate and surprising ways.
The PennApps mentorship team is working with the Dining Philosophers, Penn’s student computer science club on initiative such Coding Camps for beginners on the basics like Git and JQuery. Together, they hosted a hands-on introductory crash course called Code Weekend to get newbies (over 500 of them!) from that blinking cursor on Sublime Text to a fully functional NodeJS app with a MongoDB backend. The key difference between this and any past Tech Talks was that there were always mentors around to help the participants as they learned to hack, creating an easy environment to learn in. They’re already planning a return for Code Weekend next semester, buoyed by the success of its first outing. The Dining Philosophers also organize events like PClassic, a programming competition for high schoolers.
They’re exploring a few different avenues for innovation as well. “Hacking is really fun, but can be really difficult if you don’t know how to start. Our goal is the lower the entry bar,” Eloisa told me. A four-time PennApps veteran, she’s leading the mentorship committee for winter 2015. “We’re starting small,” she said, focusing on making the most of the resources that already exist.
And there’s a lot out there — by the team’s estimates, at least a couple year’s worth of a pre-PennApps tech talk series and other lessons, all of them relevant and pretty important. So a lot of the committee’s work is in the hunting and organizing, building comprehensive sets of reference tools and guides for new and veteran hackers alike.
But there’s more to mentorship than providing tutorials. They’re also responsible for the many intangible things that contribute to the overall hackathon experience. Some call it a hackathon’s culture, and every venue and event fields a unique mix of variables, ranging from the style and subject matter of beginner-friendly tech talks to the overall spirit of competition and collaboration.
To learn a little bit more, I spoke with Brynn. She’s a Penn senior and perhaps best known as the former director of PennApps and advisor and friend to many others. Last year, she stepped down from the director position to bring some initiatives to PennApps X for the first time, including PennApps Health, a collaboration with Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and brand new mentoring initiatives.
There’s good reason for that. She credits Pulak Mittal (a Penn grad and another former PennApps director, now working at YC) with introducing her to hackathon organization. “I didn’t really know what a hackathon was when I first started,” she told me. “There’s no reason I would have gotten into it without him.”
For Brynn, moving from a relatively new student organizer to PennApps director was a pretty challenging transition, and Pulak did the best things a mentor could. “Being in charge requires a crazy amount of confidence,” Brynn told me. “And Pulak gave me that boost. He threw me in front of people before I thought I was ready.”
And Brynn’s been giving back to the community ever since. The college hackathon movement is something special. “Hackathons are different: everyone’s sitting around working on something,” Brynn said. “Everyone’s happy to help each other. I feel like college classes aren’t exactly conducive to that.”
The mentoring movement moves well beyond PennApps, extending to other hackathons that’ve been piloting their own successful initiatives. A lot of collaboration goes on between organizers.
“There’s a lot of good friends at other hackathons, like Ben from VTHacks (Feb. 6 to 8, 2015). I’d very much consider them my mentors. The way he runs things is very different and very good, and I learned a lot from him while helping him.”
That’s the important bit: how can PennApps encourage a budding mentorship program, and what are the difficulties along the way?
A lot of comes down to fostering relationships between hackers. Not necessarily structured events, but an environment that facilitates working together. “At my first PennApps, I basically did nothing. I worked really hard for 24 hours and learned HTML, CSS, and PHP,” Brynn told me. “The people I learned most from were Yale students sitting a few tables down.”
That communal atmosphere is important, Brynn said, and it doesn’t happen by accident. For PennApps X last year, the team gave mentors color-coded stickers corresponding to the languages and frameworks they were proficient in and willing to teach. Hackers were encouraged to approach them with questions and start a dialogue.
“MHacks also had a system that went really well,” Brynn told me. “Mentors were divided into separate cores, like a Ruby core in one room. And I hope PennApps can learn from things they like and incorporate it. We aren’t going to grow unless we watch other people make ideas and iterate.”
The mentorship team, bolstered by Brynn’s original efforts, is also trying to extend the hackathon movement to other disciplines. “As someone who’s not pure computer science, I’ve seen that hacks are overwhelmingly things students need as programmers,” Brynn told me. “When I think about code, I think about pulling people who are on the fringe of other fields — those are the ideas that make the most impact.”
PennApps Health, originally piloted by Brynn toward a debut at PennApps X, is making a return for winter 2015. “Hackathons are primarily a learning experience,” proclaims Brynn. One of mentorship’s biggest missions is challenging hackers to go beyond, providing new resources and introducing them to new problems.
As PennApps approaches, the mentorship team is doubling down on their projects: the hackathon wiki, better mentor-hacker connections, and creating a friendly, collaborative environment.
Things are changing. “In some ways, hackathons are moving away from being hackathons,” Brynn told me. “There’s less emphasis on competition, prizes, and small tightly knit teams fighting each other to the death. It’s all starting to focus more on mentorship.”
And, looking into the future, that’s going to be the way forward.
Article by Tony Mei. Hackathon Insider takes you behind the scenes of PennApps Winter 2015 and explores the innter workings of hackathon organization. Interested in more? Check out part one — design — here.
