“Why do we need judges?” asks Wei.
“Winners.”
“Why do we need winners?”
“Fine,” I sigh. “No judges.” The group cheers.
It is the second Saturday of our twelve week hacker retreat on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Most of the twenty participants have been using the time to work on their start-ups, as remote developers, or on becoming better developers. As organizers, we want to see more collaboration. Thus the hackathon.
We’ve scheduled “hacking” to start after breakfast at 10AM, but so far only a few attendees have laptops out – Tico Time in full effect. My hackmate Jorge and I get started. We’re building bedspread, a room booking system for the retreat on top of Google Spreadsheets. We spend the first thirty minutes at the drawing board and the next thirty getting the HDMI cable to connect properly with the external monitor we’ve borrowed. Somewhere halfway through this, my Mac restarts. Ouch.
As hackers slowly trickle into the hackspace, we try to figure out whether to delay demos.
“Hey! Would you rather demo before dinner, or tomorrow morning?” Hackers prefer before dinner.
“I don’t know if that’ll be long enough,” says Casey, the other facilitator.
“What’chall building?” Matt stops by. Jorge and I are not the only ones stuck in setup hell. Matt and Rob are creating a chat bot for surfing forecasts, and it turns out none of the good forecast providers have APIs.
“You’da think they would,” says Matt, “but they’re all hogging it to themselves. Intellectual property, or something.” Matt and Rob consider resorting to a scraper.
We shoo Matt away and get back to work. An hour later, we have text on the browser emanating from a spreadsheet out of a Google Doc. High-five.
“You guys want some ceviche?” Casey’s spent the morning in a nearby town acquiring hackathon snacks. Jorge and I take a five-minute break and dig in.
I borrow Casey for a minute for an early demo. “As the client, what other features would you want this to have?” It turns out our calendar is not very intuitive.
We spend the next few hours on UI polish and finish with time to spare before demos. I go bother Wei about judging.
Rob and Matt are cutting it close, as Rob explains.
I was obsessively shipping commits left and right to fix small bugs. Things were working but not in the way we intended. Heroku time zones fixes were a nightmare to fix… basically, because javascript.
Matt was in “let’s just make sure we have something we can demo” mode. Every time I fixed a bug, two showed up in it’s place — like some sort of hydra.
We pushed the last fix out at 5:59 with seconds to spare.
Then we realized no one else was ready to go and we patched up the remainder of the bugs in a much less harried way.
Once demos finally get under way around 6:45, Rob and Matt’s demo goes off without a hitch, and Jorge walks he audience through how we build bedspread.
All in all, more than half of the attendees have something to show and everybody turns out to see what they have.
Wei, the judge that wouldn’t, approves. “I didn’t participate this time, but I thought the atmosphere was great” she says. “I’ll be at the next one.”
Casey leans over. “What about the hammocks?” he asks. We had purchased hammocks to give to the winning hackers. No judges, though, so no winners.
“Meh,” I say. “We’ll figure it out.”
