Remote hackathon
A long, long time ago, back before Covid-19 changed the world, (forever?), we decided to do our annual hackathon.
As the virus swept the earth, we crossed our fingers in the hope the pandemic would vanish before our hackathon.
Come May, we could see that this thing was not going away in due time.
Today, most of our colleagues are still working from home and will be for some time.
So we decided to try something new. A virtual version of our hackathon.
We tried to attend a few virtual hackathons and came away with some tips on what not to do.
It became clear that we would have to shape the hackathon ourselves and try out some new stuff to make it a success.
A learning experience for everyone.
Anti-social hackathon?
The first thing that is evidently missing from a virtual hackathon is the gathering of all the teams in one office.
You are used to feel the buzz from the other teams. You hear the laughter when the energy level is high and see the tears in their eyes, when their code doesn’t compile late at night.
The final pitch competition is also much more fun when 100 people sit together in a big room. Everybody cheering and sweating from the tension by thinking of winning the trophy.
Learnings, so far
We are only 7 hours into the hackathon, teams are working hard. Code is being produced, demos are being prepared.
People are thinking hard on how to pitch their projects tomorrow. In one region we have 17 different projects and only 5 minutes for each, it’s going to be a wild ride.
It is hard to drop by a team and talk to them as we usually do.
So we asked the teams to set up Zoom rooms, so we could drop by and see the progress.
We also interviewed the teams, gave them a few questions to answer and shared it in our hackathon channel.
Last, but not least. Every hackathon needs a soundtrack.
So we set up a collaborative playlist on Spotify to share songs about winning and songs about losing.
And songs that energize you, when you run out of energy.
A thing of it’s own
It’s clear by now that a virtual hackathon is a thing of it’s own. Entirely.
Don’t seek to replace the things from a physical hackathon one to one.
But please, whatever you do: DO remember the pizza.
