Hackathon is coming

Every year around the end of October, KMS will stop normal business activities for two days for our annual hackathon - team members will go wild on creative ideas, go nuts on rapid coding and go drunk under spirited drinks. I have a bad reputation in the org: “Jin can only code when he is drunk”, that was from a hackathon event. I love hackathon. Wherever I go, if there is no hackathon tradition in the org, I will start one. If I am not the judge, I join a team to compete. Hackathon is a great occasion to practice product sense, project management, rapid software development and presentation skills. It condenses software development lifecycle into two days. First, you have to start with an appealing idea. Appealing to who? Well, you have to make that decision, but whoever is your customer needs to be delighted by your idea. Second, you need to work backwards from that idea to form a project plan. You only have two days, so you need to cut down all the unnecessary stuff to define the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) you can actually deliver. To decide what not to do is an art in project management. Third, you have to code fast but correctly. Coding is 70% muscle memory and 30% computer science. Fluency on the tooling is critical to have a demo-able product in two days. Finally, you need to present the result well in 5 minutes. A lot of hackathon presentations spend two much time on the “how”, judges lose track what they are delivering and why it matters. Hackathon presentation is a great way to practice Customer Obsession. You need to focus on the value relevant to the listeners: it is not about what you did, it is about what they can get out of this. But maybe all these stuff are not that important as long as we have great fun together: we brainstorm, whiteboard, code, test, fail, succeed, laugh and hopefully not cry together; we work side by side for two days, to feel the camaraderie we miss by working remotely most of the time. What is more important than the trust we establish through human interactions, working on the same goals. Win or lose, who cares! I am not on judge duty. I am competing too. Are you? “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore RooseveltActivate to