hosting your own hackathons
I hosted a hackathon this weekend with 4 of my friends (3 non-technical) - and it's something I realized I was lacking in my life. not necessarily the hackathon piece, but just sitting together with a bunch of friends and working on something for the sake of working on it. we each attempted to put something net new into the world that didn't exist before hand, and I think that's an essential part of human nature that we don't exercise enough.
the 3 friends who had barely ever wrote code were naive to the difficulty of building software. there was frustration, anger, and the temptation to just give up a few hours in. but the beautiful thing was, you start to actually like something once you get some positive feedback. after climbing the initial few hurdles like setting up their dev environments, learning some swiftUI, and learning what the hell a backend even was, they started to enjoy themselves. to quote a friend "having your code build and show up on your phone the way you imagined is like crack" - this was the same person that wanted to quit a few hours before hand.
after a few hours into the hackathon and noticing the dunning-kruger effect take place in real time, I realized that programming teaches you problem solving more than anything else I've done in my life. I learned that my stoic nature isn't because I read some Marcus Aurelius a few years ago - it's because I spent more than 40% of my life building robots and/or writing code. writing code is failure therapy, you fail fast, and you fail a lot. it's how you take those failures and your reaction to them that really matters. I literally saw my friends become more stoic every hour that passed.
my other main learning is that AI will not replace the human experience, it will amplify it. you can outsource every non-creative activity you have and focus on the things that truly matter. for us, we didn't have to learn the exact syntax of a new language or have to watch hours of youtube videos - we had claude do that instead. we are entering a renaissance age of creativity where you can just think of something and bring it to life in hours and days instead of weeks and years. I think that's going to make life more fun!
would I host one of these again? for sure. the hardship of staying up all night and working towards a shared goal definitely improved my relationship with them and makes me want to host more of these. I think it was especially more fun because we were such a small group of people. I would encourage anyone reading this to just grab a few friends and hack away on something for a night - it might just change the trajectory of your life.
hacking via software was just a means to an end, but maybe I've birthed some soon-to-be cracked engineers into this world.
something I left out:
- when starting something new, it's important to find the absolute quickest path to some positive feedback. if you don't, you'll be frustrated and are much less likely to continue at whatever it is that you're trying to do.