{"id":496,"date":"2018-09-13T16:58:17","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T20:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tayloraliss.com\/blog\/?p=496"},"modified":"2018-09-14T15:35:54","modified_gmt":"2018-09-14T19:35:54","slug":"thoughts-about-hackathons-and-hackers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tayloraliss.com\/blog\/?p=496","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts about Hackathons and Hackers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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First, happy Programmers Day<\/a>!<\/p>\n

I was in an IRC chat today discussing the idea of hacking with some fellow programmers. In my opinion, modern hackathons are too focused on end-goals. Most hackathons have challenges you are expected to try to complete, or at the very least a theme that restricts the realm in which you can work. Pessimists might say that company-sponsored hackathons are a cheap way for corporations to out-source new ideas for their industry.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a quick anecdote about my first ever hackathon. It was BostonHacks 2017 and my group made the conscious decision to not try and compete for prizes through solving a given challenge, but to instead create something fun using tools we were interested in. We ended up creating an app that would call your phone every time someone tweeted and read the tweet out loud to you. We called it \u201cSpitter<\/a>\u201d because it \u201cspoke twitter\u201d. During its creation, we learned to use two APIs we had never touched before (Twitter<\/a> and Twilio<\/a>) and were extremely proud when it came time for us to present it to the judges. Take a look at how happy we were in this photo:<\/p>\n

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