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Creating Hackathons that Work (with Jon Gottfried)
1.6k Plays8 months ago
Done right, a Hackathon can be a fantastic place to be a programmer - you get time and space to build and learn, in a room full of like-minded people, with swag and prizes to sweeten the deal. It’s a great way to pick up new ideas and run with them. But done wrong it can be a waste of time. What’s the difference between a good hackathon and a bad one? What do the good ones do right, and what can we learn from that?
This week we’re talking about the Joy of Hacks with Major League Hacking Co-Founder Jon Gottfried. He’s got over 10 years of experience building a Hackathon network that provides the right environment for “structured mucking about with computers”, so we’re going to pick his brains.
If you’re ever attending a Hackathon, organising one, or looking for a way to build or contribute to your local programming community, Jon can help guide you to events that work.
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Major League Hacking: https://mlh.io/
Major League Hacking’s 2024 Event Calendar: https://mlh.io/seasons/2024/events
Games Week: https://events.mlh.io/events/10848
Jon on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@jonmarkgo
Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmarkgo
Jon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonmarkgo
Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/
Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins
Bonus link - The Great American Baking Show 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlWLSAKEedk
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#software #podcast #programming #hackathon
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Transcript
The Hackathon Spectrum: From Chaos to Career Boost
00:00:00
Speaker
Hackathons. I've been to good ones, I've been to bad ones. Probably the worst one I ever went to was just a bunch of self-professed ideas people writing concepts, vague concepts on a whiteboard, while all the programmers just stared awkwardly at their laptops. It was totally cringe inducing.
00:00:20
Speaker
But the best one I ever went to, I wrote my first proper application in Elm, which nudged my career in an interesting new direction. I met someone who quickly became a friend, and then soon after that they became a colleague, which again was a career changer. And on the day, I won a Raspberry Pi, which was terribly nice.
00:00:40
Speaker
At their best, hackathons are huge fun, they're a chance to learn and experiment and sharpen some skills, and a place to meet like-minded people in an introvert-friendly setting. But at their worst, they're a total waste of time. How do we separate the good ones from the bad ones?
Crafting Quality Hackathons: Insights from John Gottfried
00:01:00
Speaker
How do we make the good ones happen? And what else is there to get from a good hackathon?
00:01:06
Speaker
Could there be anyone better placed in the world to answer those questions than Coda turned professional hackathon organiser John Gottfried? He has been at the heart of the hackathon world for a decade since he co-founded Major League Hacking
00:01:21
Speaker
And I wanted to pick his brains and get his expertise. If we're attending hackathons, how do we find better ones? If we're organizing them, how can we do a better job? Especially when it's a company that's organizing them, and that has some conflict of interest potentially. And fundamentally, you know, we're in this to have fun and to learn. How do we do more of that? Let's find out. I'm your host, Chris Jenkins. This is Developer Voices, and today's voice is John Gottfried.
00:02:02
Speaker
My guest today is John Gottfried. John, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Chris. It's a pleasure to have you over. For the past 10 years, I think you've been doing something close to my heart, which is organizing hackathons, which I've always found a lot of fun. No, that's not true, actually. I have not always found it a lot of fun. I've had great times at hackathons. I've also been to some terrible ones.
00:02:27
Speaker
Me too. And I want to pick your brains as a veteran organizer of them. What makes the good and the bad? But before we even get to that, we should ask, what's the whole point of hackathon? What are we trying to achieve? I think of hackathons like a marathon. Everyone might be participating for a slightly different reason.
00:02:49
Speaker
You have the people that are there because they, you know, are competitive and they want to win. You have the people there where it's a personal challenge to even finish and do it in the first place. You know, you have people there who just want to do better than they did last time. It really is kind of a choose your own adventure style event, but everyone who's there is there to build something technical.
Corporate vs Community: Finding Authentic Hackathons
00:03:13
Speaker
Uh, that has a wide, wide range of meaning. You know, you can see robots or websites or homemade self-driving cars all at the same event, but everyone's there to create something. Okay. But that's the participants. What about the organizers? Cause it's a two sided coin, right? That's an interesting question. I actually don't get that one that often. Um,
00:03:38
Speaker
You know, I think that's actually changed more than the participants have over the years. You know, hackathons have often been organized as a community event. So a way to bring your local developer community together. Maybe you have a particular passion for a certain language or stack. And those events are often organized by volunteers as a way to sort of just create a dedicated time and space for their peers to build things.
00:04:07
Speaker
But over the years, you've seen a lot more corporate-driven hackathons. Like, here's a hackathon on my specific developer platform or API. Here's a hackathon on a theme that my company cares a lot about. Here's a hackathon that is designed to make me money for some reason. You see it all. The one that most resonates with me is the community-driven hackathons. And I do think that's kind of like,
00:04:38
Speaker
the purest form of the concept. But there is quite a variety of organizer motivations. Yeah. I wonder if like, I mean, I think when a company does it, it can be done well, and it can be done badly. And I'm trying to keep my opinion out of this and get yours. But I think that when a company does it really badly, it's like, we'll pay you in pizza, and you have to train yourself to use our product.
00:05:05
Speaker
I agree. The flip side is, what do you think is a good way for companies to get involved? Well, I think what you're really talking about is, what is the incentive? What is the motivation? And what is the outcome? If it is, I will trade pizza for IP, obviously that's a pretty bad deal. And I wouldn't go to that event.
00:05:32
Speaker
If it's, hey, you're a super user of this platform, and we're throwing this event to show off a new feature and get your feedback on it, that might be a very different exchange. You might already care a lot about how that platform develops, and this is an opportunity to actually be involved in that process.
00:05:52
Speaker
And so the actual economics of it might be the same. You might still just get pizza and some swag, but you could leave feeling very differently than if you came in just to serve the company and didn't get anything out of it personally. I think that what makes a good hackathon thrown by a company is a developer-first mindset. I don't want to go to an event that is designed only to accomplish the goals of the company throwing it.
00:06:22
Speaker
I think that that is a very one sided experience. If a company is thinking about what do the people who are attending this event want out of it? How can we serve them? How can we make this a valuable, memorable experience for them?
00:06:37
Speaker
That's what creates a good corporate hackathon. And there's a lot of nuance to that. I mentioned IP earlier. You should not have to sign an IP agreement to go to any hackathon, whether it's organized by a company or anyone else. You should not have to sign over even the ideas that you've created.
00:06:56
Speaker
You should be able to build whatever you want, right, within reason. You should be able to, you know, come up with creative, interesting ideas. Like, all of those things make it more of a developer experience than a company experience, but, you know, you see it all. I don't think that company hackathons are inherently bad, but I do think if you don't approach them
00:07:22
Speaker
with the actual end user in mind, they can run the risk of being exploitative. Yeah, it's like a lot of developer relations. It should be from the company, but not about the company almost. It should be about people. Exactly. And I think the same thing applies to conferences. The difference with hackathons is that you might be there writing code, but if I went to a conference,
00:07:45
Speaker
that didn't care about their attendees and only wanted to be a marketing vehicle for the company, that probably wouldn't be a very good conference. Yeah. It quickly feels like you're going to one of those timeshare meetings. They're trying to sell you an eighth of a villa in Spain or something. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So then we should look at how you
Participants' Perspectives: Students and Professionals
00:08:06
Speaker
do that. Well, like what things do you think you can give a developer from a good hackathon and then how do you organize them so that they get those things?
00:08:15
Speaker
Well, it depends on the demographic of developer that you're talking about here. So at MLH, we primarily work with developers who are early in their careers. And so for them, the motivation tends to be around learning things, stretching their skills in a safe environment, getting mentorship, connecting with peers or even industry professionals. And so the motivations tend to be very intrinsic.
00:08:42
Speaker
I want to go into this event and come out having gained some skills and connections. And honestly, like,
00:08:50
Speaker
for a college student, free food over a weekend is actually a pretty compelling proposition. They're not swimming in money for the most part. For a professional, that's quite different. Developers tend to be pretty well compensated. They probably have things going on outside of work that aren't social or hackathons. And I think you have to approach it a little differently.
00:09:17
Speaker
Things that I find really compelling about corporate hackathons, access to unreleased products, to experiment with them, test them, really be involved in the product development process. I find it really compelling to be able to gain some of the marketing audience and reach of that company. So if I'm a developer in a particular ecosystem, let's say I'm a really passionate, I don't know,
00:09:47
Speaker
GitHub open source maintainer or something, right? And I go to a GitHub hackathon. It might be a really compelling proposition for me to get featured on their blog or to gain some kind of sponsorship of my project as a prize. That's not necessarily compensating me directly, but it might be a way to leverage the greater audience of the platform that's putting on this event. I think it could be really compelling to
00:10:16
Speaker
you know, just like meet other people who are involved with the same developer ecosystem that I am. Like I remember at Twilio, you know, many, many years ago before MLH, we used to throw Twilio specific hackathons and you know, you would get these people coming who all were really excited about the platform. And honestly, like just wanted to meet other people who were as excited as they were. And so the networking and the connection part of it was just as valuable as them getting to play around with like new APIs.
00:10:45
Speaker
Oh yeah. Do you think that implies that Good Hackathon is in person rather than online?
In-Person vs Online: The Interaction Divide
00:10:53
Speaker
I think it is difficult to recreate the serendipity of in-person events online. I have been to good online events and I've been to many, many bad online events. But I do think that like,
00:11:07
Speaker
The things that are really organic and natural about being in person with a group of people, where you just happen to strike up conversation, or you see that cool sticker on someone's laptop and you ask them about it, or you get introduced by a friend
00:11:26
Speaker
like all of those interactions are not impossible virtually, but they're significantly more difficult. Like I remember, you know, back in 2020, 2021, when all events were basically online, there were a lot of attempts to build virtual networking, virtual discussion groups, like all of those sort of like serendipitous encounters. And it's a little awkward, right? Like you, you have to really, um,
00:11:52
Speaker
buy into the tooling of that process in order for it to work. And the tooling is just not as human as running into someone in a hallway. Yeah. Yeah. I think online has proven to work very well for business as usual, but for the novel stuff, I think it's harder. But what do you mean by that? I mean, like your regular weekly team meeting with people you already know well and work with for a long time.
00:12:20
Speaker
Zoom is just fine. You don't need to all be in the office, but for like brainstorming new things or planning a new direction, which is what you end up doing a hackathon every single time. Yeah. I'm not sure anyone's cracked the online version of that. I think it's hard. I mean, I certainly think like creative exercises are harder online. Um,
00:12:47
Speaker
We've all done them out of necessity at this point, but that doesn't mean it's better than being in a room with a whiteboard. Does that mean I would give up working from home? I don't know, right? That's a different question, but I do think that it's harder.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah. Most work, I think, doesn't actually need that kind of work every single day. I've done plenty of stuff where we went into the office for the start of every sprint and that work. But you've got a different part because you're presumably, you're seeing a new audience nearly every time and you're trying to cover, I'm assuming major league, you're trying to cover most of the United States. Do you end up spending a lot of time on the road?
00:13:30
Speaker
I used to spend a lot of time on the road. We actually built a program we call MLH Coaches, which is our staffing program. So it's almost like a junior dev rel program. When you say program, we're not talking software, right? Just to clarify. No, I mean a program in the sense of people can
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeah, like a strategy, a recipe, like there is software associated, but it's not a SaaS software. Okay, just checking. Yeah, so basically what we built is a junior dev rel program. And so the idea is that you have all of these people in the MLH community who are community organizers. They're running meetups on campus. They're involved with throwing hackathons. Maybe they are putting on workshops for their peers. There's kind of this like,
00:14:23
Speaker
grassroots group of people who care about building their local campus community and
00:14:30
Speaker
What if you can give those people some additional training and a travel budget and, you know, have them staff hackathons. And so this was something we built. I mean, now it's quite a few years old, but it was our solution to the we don't want to travel every weekend of our lives problem. But also it was our solution to how do we actually build the next generation of people who are, you know, developer evangelists.
00:14:54
Speaker
Um, and a lot of the people who have come out of the program are professional developer, you know, relations developer evangelists, developer advocates these days. And so it really has been a jumping off point for them. But for us, it's been, um, this, you know, mechanism to both like share what we have learned and also scale our reach.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I can see that. And I can also see it's really hard to train people for DevRel. That's the first structured semi-repeatable idea I've heard for that, which is nice. It is really hard. And I think that having people physically go to events representing MLH,
00:15:38
Speaker
is part of the secret sauce of how they learn. And we don't just throw them to the wolves. The way our training process works is there is a sort of asynchronous part. You go through curriculum. You learn things by reading and answering quizzes and watching videos and all of that. But once you've done that, you actually get flown out to an event with a group of other new coaches.
00:16:06
Speaker
they're there with a more senior staff person. And we run it like a cohort training, like everyone just like watches and sort of like, is there almost as an observer for their first hackathon to see like, how does this look and feel in reality? Once they've done that, then we do what we call a paired event, where their second event is them and one other person where they are maybe taking the lead, but the other person is there to sort of like guide them. Yeah.
00:16:32
Speaker
And only after they've been to those two events, sometimes three, do they actually go to an event solo. And so there is this gradual ramp-up process that I think really familiarizes people with what's going on. And hackathons are kind of a chaotic environment, right? And so at any given moment, they might be helping someone debug their code, or they might be setting up catering, right? And I think that both of those things are actually valuable parts of learning how to serve a community.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, the reality of just keeping the wheels on the engine, right? Yeah. Okay. Then in that case, if you trained all these people, you're perfectly placed to answer my next big question. Because I've been to probably the worst hackathon I ever went to. We showed up in a room for the day and I'm kind of paraphrasing here, but they essentially said, medicine, build something.
00:17:26
Speaker
It's just so abstract and so vague that nobody got anywhere. How do you actually say, okay, some people are coming into a room to write some code, to learn some things. How do we structure this day that everyone will get something out of it? A lot of it has to do with how you kick off the event. I certainly wouldn't go to an event and say, hey, New York, go build something.
00:17:52
Speaker
You know, for us, a good chunk of participants are first timers at every event. It's just part of our model. It's intentional. We typically have an opening ceremony that lasts maybe an hour or something like that, sometimes shorter, where our local organizers, so like in MLH's model, we have local chapters basically on every campus that are doing their events.
00:18:20
Speaker
So the local organizers run that opening ceremony. They talk about why they're throwing the event. They talk about what people are there to accomplish. They talk about the theme. Sometimes hackathons have different themes or focus areas. And then they often talk about APIs and sponsors and prizes. And it's an interesting concept because I've had various conversations and debates with people over the years about whether sponsors are additive or
00:18:50
Speaker
negative component of hackathons. I think they add a lot because if you're not required to use any particular API, but you have the option to with people there who are experts in it, that's a really cool opportunity. What you're describing here where it's like, what do I do at this event?
Hackathon Essentials: Sponsors, Creativity, and Learning
00:19:10
Speaker
Having people there who are maybe experienced developer advocates or MLH coaches or people representing a developer platform,
00:19:18
Speaker
Uh, they can help guide you. And so often what happens is people go up on stage and demo an API or talk about, you know, how you can get free credit for a platform and what it does. And that can get the gears turning of like, what do I want to play around with and build this weekend? Um, you know, the vast majority of people decide on their project, like the day of the hackathon, you know, it's not something they've been planning for many weeks in advance. Uh, and so seeing who's there and who can
00:19:48
Speaker
both give them free stuff and also mentor them, can guide some of those project ideas. I know when I used to participate in a lot of hackathons, I often had various vague concepts in my mind, and what helped me hone in on them was hearing, oh,
00:20:10
Speaker
Someone brought, you know, an Apple Vision Pro and they're giving a prize away for the best use. That sounds really fun. Like I'm going to play with that this weekend. And you see a lot of that happening. This is the first time you've mentioned this word, but I think it's an important one in Hackathon's play. To what degree is this about mucking about with computers?
00:20:31
Speaker
I think it's almost entirely about that. I think I sometimes describe hackathons to people as like an educational bait and switch. And I don't mean that in a negative way, but like, you know, you're a college student. If someone went to you and you're like, Hey, why don't you spend your weekend at this like learning event? You'd probably be like, no, I'd rather go, you know, like play video games with my friends or go out to a bar or whatever. Um, the way it's framed is,
00:20:58
Speaker
come to an event, there's free food, there's swag, there's going to be a lot of free credits for different platforms, and it'll be this super fun, enjoyable way to play around with technology. The learning is a side effect of that. People are primarily engaging
00:21:16
Speaker
in hackathons because they enjoy the process of building something. The outcome may not even be important. It's not uncommon to see people demoing their project at the end of the hackathon, and they're like, hey, this was our concept, and we got 30% of it working. But we learned a lot about how to use, I don't know, AWS for the first time.
00:21:40
Speaker
because it's fun, right? And like developers, I think inherently like tinkering. And the reason why this format is so powerful compared to sitting in your, you know, room tinkering alone is that everyone else is also tinkering around you. And so there's this sort of like energy to it that I find incredibly motivating. And I think a lot of other people do too, to just like see what you can do, right? And then see what his,
00:22:10
Speaker
drawing your attention. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if we can transplant that because you're talking about a younger demographic, but I also meet plenty of coders who have been sucked into the sprint steamroller backlogs, bit of management, and they've completely lost touch with why they got into programming in the first place. Do you think we can organize things that will bring the joy back to the season programmers? Absolutely.
00:22:38
Speaker
When I was a developer evangelist before doing MLH, most of our hackathons that we ever did were for professionals. The student thing is much more recent, I think. And it's what MLH is focused on. But I actually think that a lot of the community organized
00:23:02
Speaker
developer events for professionals faded away over the years. And I think that's kind of a shame. And I would like to see more of them. I'm only speaking for London here, but it definitely entirely contracted during Covid and it hasn't come back the way it did. No, not in the same way. And you should be pretty well placed to come up with some suggestions how we can reinvigorate it. Put you on the spot. Any ideas?
00:23:31
Speaker
I don't know that you need a novel new concept. I actually think what you need is passionate community organizers. The best events I ever went to were scrappy, they were low budget, and they were just someone who really cared about getting a bunch of interesting people together to build something. One of the best hackathons I ever went to, and this is maybe back in
00:23:58
Speaker
I think it's 2008, 2009. It was this event called Music Hack Day, which was a series for a long time. And it was largely organized by like a bunch of music API companies. But the premise was
00:24:12
Speaker
get a bunch of musicians and programmers and other technical people together to build cool music tech hacks over the weekend. And so you would see everything from like, I built a new way to build playlists with your friends to I built this new instrument with like an Arduino and a bunch of like weird, you know, cardboard boxes. And
00:24:33
Speaker
I found that like such a, I don't know, like kind of like inspiring concept because it was multidisciplinary. People were really there for fun. And you always saw like such weird, interesting, like kind of creative applications of this stuff.
00:24:52
Speaker
And the other thing they did that I thought was really kind of unique is they would bring in a DJ for the hackathon at night to have a little party as part of the hackathon. So everyone would take a break from coding together and hang out and listen to some music and then go back to coding. And it really was this experience more than it was an event with a really specific goal.
00:25:15
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that's a nice balance of the, I think, like I said, I think vague things don't work for hackathons, but it's a nice balance of the specific and the open ended mixing in with music.
Passionate Organizers: The Heart of Successful Hackathons
00:25:28
Speaker
But it doesn't have, uh, it's not entirely abstract. Yeah. Yeah. Too vague. And you feel like you're just drifting too specific. It feels like homework and there is a sweet spot in the middle, but so
00:25:44
Speaker
community stuff. Yes, definitely. And that makes some of the best hackathons. And yet if you really, really get serious about enjoying building hackathons, as you have, you've turned that into a business model. How do you go from weekend coder for fun to actually turning this into something sustainable? So a lot of it was about
00:26:12
Speaker
the level of impact we wanted to have. So before MLH, uh, myself and my co-founder, uh, Swift, we were both developer evangelists. I worked for Twilio. He worked for Sengrid. And you know, this was that 2010, 2011 timeframe where I think there was a lot of community energy in tech in general, um, especially in New York where we both lived and,
00:26:39
Speaker
We had both been involved with student developer communities, sometimes as mentors, sometimes as sponsors. And it was something we cared a lot about. It's very apparent when you go on campus and talk to a bunch of students who are learning to build technology that these community events totally change how they think about it.
00:27:02
Speaker
a stodgy old classroom where you're listening to a professor like drone on about algorithms. It's, Hey, like let's build something fun. And I get that, you know, the theory is important and it's a good foundation, but for most people, it's not the part that they are passionate about. Right. And maybe that's how it's taught. I don't know, but you know, these community events really did unlock something for a lot of people. Yeah. And so when we were thinking about like, what do we want to spend our time on?
00:27:31
Speaker
There was both a lot of organic demand for more student events on campus, but there was also a need for structures around it. So we could have easily kept doing this on the side. We could have just helped people out as a nice favor and been the general mentors of the student developer community.
00:27:56
Speaker
I think the big thing in the early days that MLH accomplished was creating formal connective tissue between all these campuses. MIT, Stanford, they've had hacker culture for 60 years. I went to a state school in New York. It was a fine school. No hacker culture to speak of before 10, 15 years ago, at least not in the sense that we're talking about.
00:28:25
Speaker
By creating a structure around it, you started to give those schools validation and permission to do their own hacker communities. And not only that, you started to actually create ways for them to work with many other schools nearby.
00:28:46
Speaker
in a way that felt like safe and welcoming and well thought out. And so going back to it, I said part of why we made it a business is to broaden our impact. There's a point at which if we're doing this just as volunteers, we don't have enough hours in the day or weekends in the year to support as many campuses as we thought we could support.
00:29:11
Speaker
you know, we could have been a nonprofit, we could have been a business. It doesn't matter, right? Like they're all organizations that are designed to build something. And I think for us, it was our way of being able to support 200 schools instead of, you know, five. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. There's something I've got to ask you about that in the sustainability side, but I want you to be a bit more specific about connective tissue between universities. What do you actually mean by that?
00:29:42
Speaker
So there's a couple of things I mean. One is literally helping people arrange like communication between different campuses so that people can travel to each other's events. So, you know, one of the things we haven't touched on is that all MLH events are actually intercollegiate in that I host an event at Columbia University in New York. You might have people driving from four or five, six hours away to go to that event. And so,
00:30:11
Speaker
you get this sort of like cross pollination of a lot of different schools where even if you're like the one hacker at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, you can go be part of that community. And so that's one thing is like literal transportation networks and communication. The other part of it is like shared values and expectations. So one of the things that you said early on is that like you went to a terrible hackathon. So how do you prevent that, right? Like,
00:30:40
Speaker
I think the way you prevent that is by having a standardized set of what makes a good hackathon that people can emulate and expand on. So for us, we literally set out rules for what is required to be part of the MLH Hackathon League. Your event has to be free for participants to attend.
00:31:06
Speaker
allow people to own their own IP. It has to have a code of conduct. Like it has to allow people from multiple schools. And there's literally like documents on our website that detail all of this. But it means that you could go to an MLH hackathon in New York, you could go to one in London, you could go to one in Bangalore, and they will all have like some shared sense of values.
00:31:31
Speaker
Does that actually translate into some practical consistency? I mean, I'm thinking of Starbucks. I can go into a Starbucks in a year in the world and get basically the same experience. If I dive into a MLH event in New York, will I expect to be roughly as good as a London one? I think so, yeah. Every local group puts a little bit of a twist on it, but you should be able to expect
00:31:57
Speaker
at least a similar quality experience. I don't think it's quite as standardized as Starbucks. Like even from a branding perspective, like every event has their own brand and like all of those things, but the values are consistent, right? Like you're not going to show up to an event in London and be surprised that someone suddenly owns all of your ideas, right? Like that's not gonna happen. And there's other considerations too.
00:32:24
Speaker
And now we're getting really into the nitty gritty, but like, how do you know that the event you're showing up for is actually happening? Right? Like, I've been to events where it was listed on Meetup and I show up and no one's there. You know, so like we do some quality control of these events where it's like, we look at their venue confirmation from their school. We look at their budget to see that they can actually afford food for the number of people they're expecting. And you got to remember, like the people organizing these events are
00:32:54
Speaker
college students. So that's not to say they, you know, don't know what they're doing. But for many of them, it's the first time they're organizing a large scale event. And so we provide a lot of support to them as organizers as well, so that they have the ability to like, make their creative ideas for the tackathon a reality, but also be able to handle the logistics of putting on a big event. That's actually cool, especially I mean, that's a that's a reusable skill, even if they don't stay in tech, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you definitely see a lot of like,
00:33:24
Speaker
non-technical or tech adjacent people involved in organizing the events. Oh, that's cool. Is there a particular theme to that? I mean, there are like, what kinds of people who aren't there for the tech get involved? You definitely see folks who are in business departments who like want to work in tech, but might not be studying computer science. You see people who are interested in the marketing component of it. You see people who are interested in like selling sponsorships. You see people who are just like really into logistics, like
00:33:52
Speaker
They love getting quotes from caterers. I mean, it's funny, but it's not really a joke. But yeah, you get all types. And I think that one of the really kind of unique things about this as a college student is suddenly
00:34:11
Speaker
You're in this position of authority where you're putting on an event for hundreds of people. You might have tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in a budget that you are managing with another group of students. And there's little to no administrator involvement. And that's like a first experience for a lot of these people where it's like, oh, I'm in charge of something.
00:34:34
Speaker
there are real stakes, there are real people involved and I want to make it good. Uh, and I think that's like a super cool experience to have when you're, you know, just starting out in your career where it's like, Oh, like I'm making a budget and I'm putting together a sponsorship deck and I'm setting a schedule and doing email communications. And you're right. Like those are incredibly valuable, like professional skills of how do I create something out of nothing?
00:35:02
Speaker
I mean, this is dark, but I have to wonder, are you ever on the phone to someone at 2am when they're having a meltdown because they're not on top of the logistics?
00:35:11
Speaker
Yes. I mean, the logistical meltdowns don't happen as often as you would think, but like we literally have an on-call shift rotation at MLH where our full-time staff like rotate weekends of when we're on call. And you know, sometimes it's a code of conduct incident. Like we have a very formal process for handling that. Um, sometimes it is, Oh no, the caterer didn't show up. What do we do? But you know, we've seen it all and,
00:35:41
Speaker
Part of being a larger organization that supports a lot of local communities is over time you build backup plans on backup plans to deal with things that can come up. We have budgets set aside where someone missed a decimal point and now they need $500 to get food for their event. That's something that we can shoulder.
00:36:07
Speaker
Sometimes it's like, Oh no, someone got stuck in an airport and their flight was delayed and they need an Uber for two hours to get to this event. You know, like there's all sorts of weird things that come up, but we do have a lot of ability to handle that often more than like the local student groups do just because we're, you know, full-time staff at an organization. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like at the bottom of a drops out of tech, you can go into being a very effective wedding planner. Maybe, you know, it's funny, like I, um,
00:36:36
Speaker
I never thought that that would be a big part of my job, but I certainly have learned a lot about logistics and planning events. But I did used to do this for fun. Before MLH, I was one of those community organizers putting on weird events in New York, so it wasn't out of nowhere.
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. You've taken it on with more aplomb than I would have done, the logistics part. I always think of logistics as like a programmer. I just want to throw things and have it build an index for me and be automatically organized. That would be nice. That would be nice. OK, so getting back to the community angle of it, because I'm interested in this. You've been doing this for about 10 years, a bit more if you count your time at Twilio, right?
Technology Trends: AI, Web3, and Developer Concerns
00:37:20
Speaker
Has the nature of the game changed? I mean, I'm thinking as a launching off point for that, perhaps, like lots of programmers these days are saying it's the end of programming. AI is going to change everything. You must be seeing that right on the ground. Is it? Yes and no. You know, I do think that AI is going to change a lot of things.
00:37:50
Speaker
I do not believe even for a second that AI is going to get rid of programmers. Like, the hard part of programming is coming up with simple solutions to really complex abstract human problems. And AI is not very good at
00:38:07
Speaker
AI is really good at pattern matching. It's really good at creating, you know, basic frameworks for things. It's even really good at solving complex technical questions. But it's really bad at taking someone's app idea and turning it into something that anyone would want to use. Right. So like the there's a gap there. I do think that AI will be a
00:38:36
Speaker
necessary part of being a programmer. If nothing else, it is going to be the best programming assistant we've ever seen. Being able to have code suggestions, being able to have smarter debugging, being able to have smart refactoring, all of that is incredibly powerful. And frankly, it's something I use all the time.
00:39:00
Speaker
I haven't seen anything yet that tells me it can handle the really creative, abstract, problem-solving aspect of programming. Yeah, yeah. When it's the creative stuff, the brand new stuff that can't be pattern-matched against existing data, I think that's true. But I'm also wondering if it's changed, like, students' expectations going in. Are they expecting AI to solve all their problems?
00:39:28
Speaker
I mean, there was a time when I assume half the people at your things were talking about blockchain and now they're no longer doing that. What are the trends that you've seen over the past 10 years? We've seen a lot of trends come and go. Like 10 years is a long time in tech. You know, 10 years ago, React wasn't a thing, right? Or at least certainly not a popular thing.
00:39:54
Speaker
And so we've seen a lot of those kind of things over the years. Like there was a time when Oculus came out where that was an incredibly popular thing to build on. There was a time where we saw like this explosion of Web3 projects, which is still somewhat happening to be honest, though, you know, less so in finance and more and just like I'm tinkering with cool technology. AI is different, like,
00:40:24
Speaker
People have been doing machine learning and AI projects for a really long time, even at hackathons. The ease of doing it is different now. The people who I used to see doing those kinds of projects were math people.
00:40:41
Speaker
They were interested in building neural networks. They were interested in statistics. They were interested in training data, which is great. Those people probably have fantastic jobs right now. I think the difference now is that's become generally accessible. The APIs to access a large language model or an image generator or whatever else are plug and play.
00:41:09
Speaker
much broader application of AI in projects. And so, you know, creative ideas do come out of that. Like, I think there is still a lot of room for experimentation, even just using something like a chat GPT API.
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can see that. Do you think people, is that the main thing that students are excited about now? Is there, is there, I mean, I guess I'm asking what's hot right now. I mean, AI is certainly hot. I think the other thing that's hot is like, and this is going to sound really kind of dark is like, where do I get a job? You know, like the last year or two,
00:41:58
Speaker
have been not an easy time for people, especially people entering the industry. And I do think that students are having to get creative about where they look for career opportunities. It's not like an obvious path where I go apply to a fang company and they're hiring thousands of interns and like, that is just like how things work. I'm seeing a lot more people like applying to local tech companies or applying to insurance companies that hire developers.
00:42:26
Speaker
or whatever else. And I know that's not like a technical problem they're solving, but it is an existential problem that a lot of people are thinking about. Yeah. Is that something that you deliberately go after and organize? Do you, I mean, for funding, do you go after sponsors who are hoping the quid pro quo is they get easy hiring?
00:42:48
Speaker
We certainly do work with folks who are hiring a lot of developers. We have not really done it in a recruiting firm sort of way. Like we don't do matches. Usually it's like employer marketing campaigns. And so, hey, like, you know, you're at the tackathon. Welcome. By the way, this company is hiring developers. You should think about applying. All of our marketing tends to be a little bit like soft touch like that.
00:43:18
Speaker
Most of our clients though are developer relations teams. Like MLH has proven to be a really effective way to build awareness of a platform, to get a lot of new people trying it and ultimately to like make it part of someone's tool belt in a way that when the need arises in the professional environment, they're already familiar with the tool from having built with it as a student at a hackathon. And we've been around long enough now where we can actually track that like long tail value of
00:43:48
Speaker
do people actually introduce things at work that they learned at a hackathon? And they do. And so that tends to be where most of our business is funded from.
Developer Relations and Hackathon Motivations
00:43:59
Speaker
And I do think there's opportunities to do more in the recruitment space and something that we've played around with over the years, but it's a tough space to operate in. Recruitment specifically, you mean? Yeah.
00:44:15
Speaker
Yeah. So where are you funded? What is your primary source? Is it just DevRel departments looking to train students? There's largely DevRel departments who want to effectively do a scalable education program.
00:44:33
Speaker
they can basically take advantage of MLH's infrastructure to say, hey, let's give out API credit at 50 hackathons and give people educational resources and see what they build with our platform without having to sponsor 50 events and fly all over the world. Yeah, yeah. How do you do that in a non-icky way, if I can ask that question? No, it's a good question. I mean, I think it comes back to what I said earlier, that it's like a soft touch marketing.
00:45:02
Speaker
What I mean by that is it's never required to use any platform. We try to make it as interesting and exciting as possible. And we try to come up with fun spins on it. Are there cool prizes we can give away? Are there interesting use cases we can highlight? I think that if we are able to get developers excited about a platform, they will want to use it organically. I think if you try to force it, it's not fun anymore.
00:45:32
Speaker
Um, the other big part of it, to be honest, is that we actually, like the prices are meant to be small enough that you feel good, but big enough that you feel like, like recognized for your work and you can go too big and we try to avoid going too big. So like.
00:45:53
Speaker
never do we see prizes where it's like, here's $50,000 if you went on this platform, right? It's always like 50 bucks or a hundred bucks for like something that we think will get you to continue building. So here's an Arduino kit. Here's credit for a cloud platform. Here's a pair of noise canceling headphones. You can work. And I think that like having aligned incentives makes it feel less icky because now you're like, oh, cool. Like I built something fun and I got something fun as a prize, not,
00:46:23
Speaker
this is a cut for a competition where I want to win $50,000. Is that what goes wrong when you spend too much on prizes? Absolutely. It changes the mood. I do think it changes the mood. I think that there is a... I don't know exactly what the tipping point is, but certainly there is a point at which
00:46:41
Speaker
there is so much money on the line that you now start to create a hyper competitive behavior that is I think like counterproductive to the play aspect of hackathons and it's not the same event anymore. We actively discourage that. I do think that like
00:47:04
Speaker
You know, maybe there's a time and place for that. If you're like a startup incubator, that's like giving someone funding and everyone knows that going into it. I don't think the time and place for that is like learning events on campus or community events in a developer community. Yeah. Okay. What about the flip side of that then? Cause you do have prizes. Why not have no prizes at all? What does it do having something? Winning a prize at a hackathon.
00:47:34
Speaker
even a small prize can be an incredible motivator for people to keep being engaged with the community. Like I remember many, many years ago, I did this like developer contest on some blog where they were like, the best project this month wins a Kindle, right? And I was, I just like built like a fun project. It was like a cool, you know, like time to experiment with this API and I won it.
00:48:04
Speaker
And I felt so good that this company had recognized what I built. And it was not a good application. It was like just like a throw away like experimental idea. But it felt so like I don't know. I felt like really special to be recognized by someone for something that I had created. I think for a student.
00:48:25
Speaker
that's doubly true, where your whole life is you're graded for your work against specific prompts. At a hackathon, you could be rewarded and recognized for a creative idea that you came up with and built on your own. And that is incredibly powerful because you leave that experience feeling like, wow, I can do more than I thought I was capable of. I'm going to keep doing this kind of thing because clearly other people think it's cool.
00:48:56
Speaker
And for the people who don't win, it gives them an aspirational path, right? Like you might be there at your first hackathon and you might see your friend, you know, nearby who just won a prize and you're like, wow, they built something really cool. I could do something like that next time. Yeah. I think it's really powerful. And I think that like, if the prizes are small, if they are designed to keep people building, if they're designed to make people feel recognized, like that is an incredibly powerful like loop.
00:49:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And it's a good reminder that these aren't just sides or accounting machines. There is a creative aspect to programming, right? Yeah. And like, it's almost like judging an art competition. You know, like, how do you, how do you, like, I judge a lot of hackathons and
00:49:45
Speaker
I always find it to be an interesting challenge to explain to other judges how to evaluate projects. How do you judge a website versus a robot? I don't know, right? I usually think about how much did this person learn? How much did they stretch their abilities? How novel is their implementation?
00:50:06
Speaker
uh, how, you know, well thought out is their implementation. Uh, I don't really care if it has business value, but like, did they make something cool? And did they do that in a way that was like a stretch for them? Great. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a nice set of criteria actually. And the antithesis of what definitely happened to the hacking scene in the,
00:50:30
Speaker
probably about eight to 10 years ago, where it became very bro culture about huge prizes and trying to come up with the next big unicorn in a weekend. Yes. And, you know, like I was at a lot of those events. Like I used to go to a lot of the hackathons where people were trying to launch startups and, you know, it was certainly an interesting experience, but I don't think it creates a like
00:50:59
Speaker
creative catalyst in the same way. So I have to ask you this as a point of contrast, like. Please. You're not going after major competition, major prizes and I mean, each event is self-contained. In what sense is it major league hacking?
00:51:27
Speaker
So we actually do release rankings of the universities every year. That is probably the most major league part of it. To be honest, like we have more ideas around making an intercollegiate competition in the early days. And I think partially we found that it wasn't entirely necessary and partially like it
00:51:54
Speaker
I mean, mostly it just wasn't necessary. We originally thought, oh, people will be really motivated to bring people to other campuses and earn points based on how much they travel around and all of that. But then people were doing it anyway, even though the rankings were just a ranking and no prize. And so we've kept doing it, but it hasn't really been the focal point of our model. But the brand is cool. It's fun. People like it. And so why change it? It's a good, memorable name. Yeah.
00:52:24
Speaker
Maybe that's, I mean, I suppose it's like the prizes, right? It's another fun tweak to keep the party going, the learning, playing party, right? It is. And you know, it's funny, like, when we announce the rankings every year, schools are proud of it. Like, it gives the student group on campus visibility to their administration. Sometimes it gives them visibility to employers. Like,
00:52:49
Speaker
It is, even though there is no prize money or like reward associated with it, people are proud to say that they were like the top five, you know, hacker universities of the year.
Playful Experimentation in a Commercialized Tech Culture
00:53:01
Speaker
And, you know, we've specifically designed like the scoring so that it's not about being the top CS school on an international ranking. It's really like how engaged and active is your local hacker community.
00:53:15
Speaker
How on earth do you judge that? Because that's even harder than judging an individual entry. A lot of it is about cross-pollination. How much do people from your campus go engage with other nearby campuses? How do you put on events that serve a lot of students? We have various ways of quantifying that, but a lot of it's about how engaged and active are the students on your campus.
00:53:44
Speaker
OK. And do you find that people continue with it after they've graduated? I think so. I think that it changes. You know. The way that you spend your free time as a professional, even a young professional. Yeah. It's super different than the way you spend your time when you're on campus. Like you often have more responsibilities, you often have a full time job, you often have like
00:54:14
Speaker
all sorts of stuff going on. I definitely think that the people who go through our events keep building. I don't think they're still going to hackathons every weekend. I think a lot of them do participate from time to time, but what we see more is their efforts go towards open source work, or I'm building a fun side project with my friends over a longer period of time, or I'm speaking at conferences. You find other ways to do the creative side of technology.
00:54:44
Speaker
If you keep the spirit, then you graduate on that too, I guess. One of the reasons I ask is I wanted to get you to contrast, because another way people get learning programming these days and students in particular is like bootcamps. And that seems much more fixed, self-contained, possibly. I don't know. I want your opinion on what you think the strengths and weaknesses are of the two formats.
00:55:12
Speaker
you're saying of like a traditional computer science education versus a bootcamp? Um, no, I was, I was actually more thinking like someone who wants to spend their time going to hack events, hack weekend versus someone that signs up for a specific bootcamp. I don't think there is a difference. I think that, uh, so for us,
00:55:33
Speaker
we have an incredibly broad definition of what a student is. So when we say we have a student event, you could be a university student, you could be a bootcamp student, you could be someone who's like taking a MOOC on your own. We don't care. What we care about is that you're early in your career learning this stuff for the first time. And so you do sometimes see like bootcamp students going to our hackathons and engaging with all of this and being a part of this. I don't think that
00:56:01
Speaker
the way that you learn programming or computer science fundamentals matters so much in how you decide whether or not to engage with developer communities. You see people who are in boot camps who are highly engaged, you see people in computer science programs who are highly disengaged, right, and they're just trying to like get their degree and move on.
00:56:24
Speaker
usually the thing that is the difference maker is someone giving you a personal pitch on the experience. And so there's a little bit to impact there. I think that part of what makes Hackathon special is that they are somewhat of a niche community with their own jargon and culture and all of those things.
00:56:54
Speaker
Part of being a niche community is that it's a little weird. If you think about the pitch objectively of like, hey, you should go spend your weekend in a room with a bunch of other people locked away building technology, that may not be the most compelling pitch if you just see it on a website.
00:57:15
Speaker
The thing that usually gets someone to go is a friend inviting them and being like, hey, this was an incredible experience. You would love this. Come with me to suspend disbelief. And then people are hooked. And that experience can happen no matter what kind of educational background you have.
00:57:34
Speaker
But I do think it's kind of like necessary to be invited in, in a way. And we see people doing that in like mass formats on campus. Like you see people where they're literally going classroom to classroom, pitching their fellow students on hackathons. That's cool. Yeah, it is really cool. But I do think it's like, you know, they don't need to be something that is like,
00:58:04
Speaker
easily marketable, you know, like it's okay for it to be somewhat niche and insular because that makes it feel more special and almost like immune to some of the weirder stuff in the tech culture at large. Yeah, yeah. There has always been in tech, I guess, an identity of people playing with computers just to see what they can do with them.
00:58:31
Speaker
And it has receded into the background a little, I think, since there's been so much VC money floating around the culture. It would be nice to bring that back alive. I completely agree. I think that there's a lot that's been written about
00:58:51
Speaker
the mainstreamization of tech, right? Like are people who previously were gonna go work on Wall Street now going to tech because that's where the money is? I do think there's components of that, but I also think that you have just as many people who are just like excited about and in love with technology and have a creative juice to put in it.
00:59:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let me maybe then perhaps finish on, I'm going to use a sports term here, which is way out of my depth. What's your Hail Mary pass? I hope I'm using that correctly for the people who are more senior in tech and have lost touch with that joy of programming. Do you have any suggestions for how we can get it back within our lives?
00:59:41
Speaker
Part of the magic of hackathons is that it is a dedicated time and space away from the other things in your life. And I think that as a senior person, you know, you might have a family, you might have a lot of stuff going on, finding even a weekend to spend time with some other interesting people to just experiment and be creative, I think it's just an incredibly powerful experience.
01:00:10
Speaker
I don't think it has to be like a big formalized hackathon. Get three or four friends together, you know, just hang out at someone's house to build stuff. But having that like dedicated time and space creatively to just play around is what I've seen is that it often like relights that spark that a lot of people had when they first went into tech.
01:00:35
Speaker
It can be really easy for tech to just become just a job where you do your sprint planning and you write the code and you get your code reviews and it just happens. Maybe that's fun for some people. I think for a lot of people it becomes a route. Setting aside some time with your friends to be creative is really magical and I think more people should do it.
01:01:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's making me think I know some, uh, I know some guys, like particularly fathers who will organize a dad's weekend to play golf. And that's not my cup of tea, but maybe that, you know, maybe the next time you're over in England, you can help me co-organize a coding weekend. Awesome. John, great talking to you. And hopefully I will bump into a hackathon before too long.
01:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me, and I'm sure I'll see you soon. Happy hacking. Thanks. Thank you, John. I've now got dreams of organizing a hack weekend somewhere in the rolling foothills of Italy. Mediterranean food, good wine, the sun setting in the distance, and missing all of it because my code won't compile. That's a good time right there.
01:01:52
Speaker
If you're up for joining a Hackathon, you'll find a link to Major League Hacking in the show notes, or it's mlh.io. If you're watching this roughly as it goes out, I noticed they've got a Games Hacking Week next week, which is online and global. I might see if I can find time to join that. That sounds like a lot of fun.
01:02:10
Speaker
And I've also put a link in the show notes to the trailer for last year's Great American Bake Off. See if you recognise one of the contestants. That's a little easter egg to be going on with.
01:02:23
Speaker
Before you go, if you've enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like, share, and rate it. And make sure you're subscribed, because we'll be back next week with another delicious slice of the software world. Until then, I've been your host, Chris Jenkins. This has been Developer Voices with John Gottfried. Thanks for listening.