Lesson: Intro to Hacking with Greg Osuri

Step: #5 The Logistics: How does it all work?

A hackathon is an event where coders come together and code continuously for anywhere from 8 to 24 hours. There are also hack weeks which last for a week, where people don't necessarily continuously do it, but certainly the momentum is still there. People try to work on something they're not normally working on in their daily lives.

Everything in a hackathon runs on a clock, just like an event. It is a good event and everything runs on a clock. You've got to make sure whatever you do, you just stick to the clock. The key takeaways to running a good hackathon are engagement with the hackers. You've got to figure out a way to get sponsors and the people that are there for distributing their APIs with the people that are going to consume those APIs. That engagement drives a lot of what happens in the hackathon.

Second of all is comfort. Make sure you have good seating, good food and good environment so that people can work. The third thing is fun. Make sure it's a lot of fun. People aren't out there to waste their weekend away. People are there versus doing something else on the weekend to hack and make sure they can do that.

You'll be amazed what people can do in 24 hours. You can actually build a shippable hack. That means you can hack something up and expect people to use it and then be okay with using it. It's certainly very possible. That speed to market and speed to see the results has significantly shown, especially with the Facebook's penetrations, Facebook's culture, everything in Facebook is about hacking. The Like buttons came up from hacking. The news feed came up from a hackathon. It was an internal Facebook hackathon. So a lot of the facts are being proved and it's really easy these days. It's really easy to learn how to program and hack something up really quick.