Development Challenges — An Alternative to Hackathons?

HackSociety | Attend

We at HackSociety believe in empowering young minds in order to bring forth their unfathomable talent and the innovation hidden deep inside. For now, software development is considered a tedious and boring job, resulting in a tremendous decrease in the number of real technology enthusiasts. We strongly believe that this needs to change if developers across the globe are to build products that make the lives of the people around them easier.

Hackathon (Ideally): A competition among software and/or hardware developers to build a spectacular project that provides a hard-hitting solution to an existing problem.

Having been to a great many hackathons by now, it is pretty safe for team HackSociety to give out a small definition of the same.

However, that is not how most of the current hackathon attendees define it. Here’s the midset a lot of them have:

A rat race among developers to build a partially working project that uses a few of the latest technologies and can be presented well.

While this approach mostly leads to a phenomenal success at an overnight event, it results into zero gains otherwise for everyone in the practical world. Hackathons as a concept were meant to build products that could alleviate day-to-day problems of life. However, the current trends have converted them into a non-productive set of overnight gatherings with free food and beverages, that serve as marketing campaigns for the sponsors. This leads to very few tangible results for the participants, the organisers as well as the sponsors.

However, there are a few visionaries striving for change. They see how activities like recruitment through these events has changed the entire scenario. They understand how the most fun retreat of the geeks and lovers of technology has turned into a tug-of-war between the coders of various levels pushing their weight through the thick smoke of uncertainty in the rat-race version of software development. Their visions for a solution to the same range from “hosting hackathons just for the sake of building products, without a prize” to “inviting like-minded people to build something awesome every weekend”.

HackSociety on the other hand, is ready with a delicious cuisine of its own for you, while others are contemplating on the best diet plan that suits all, i.e developers, organisers and sponsors. We are proud to present Hacks for Society, a series of well-curated weekly online challenges, that will require developers to build real-world products that will be used by an actual set of end-users. Hence, unlike your regular hackathons, these smart hackathons will provide everyone with tangible results.

Every participant will get to learn by actually building stuff for the production level. Their products will be designed to scale, as they will be used by a considerable number of people and hence tested thoroughly. This test will not only reflect the algorithmic correctness of the code, but its capability to endure multiple hits as well. Moreover, these will be open-source softwares and hence may have multiple contributors offering their own tweaks to the same, and adding to its performance.

The concept would also lead to a participation from the best companies in the field of technology, putting up the simplest of problems before you, while giving you the required space to innovate and add functionalities that would provide an extra edge to the product.

While the challenges will be open for all, i.e beginners, learners and experts, we would like to take this opportunity to invite all the experts out there to come forward and lend a helping hand to others. We would require them to build a small tutorial within the first three days of the week, which may be a set of videos or slides explaining the best way to begin with the development of the product of the week. These individuals will be given the title of mentor of the week with a certificate from us and recognition on the social media and our website.

Lastly, there is something for the organisers who would like to curate a separate challenge for their respective colleges or organisations too. They can host a private challenge on our portal and just the people they invite would be able to register for the same. Although, the description of the challenge and its stats will be open to all.

Hence, in an effort to summarise the above in a single statement, here is a definition of the solution we are offering:

A set of dedicated challenges that make developers solve real-world problems by building robust and production-level products in a single week’s time

These products then would be analysed by the problem-setters and the ones they deem fit would be tested in real-time with real users. Recognition for building the product however, will be given to the developers only.

As a proof of concept to the same, HackSociety has decided to keep the first challenge as a basic telegram bot challenge. It is an easy level challenge and will be used to give the users of our website, a rough idea of what the flow of these challenges is going to be.

The bot developed in this challenge will be used by all our partner hackathons for their on-event and post-event functions, as well as the participants. It will ease out a lot of the processes that need to be followed at every hackathon and other technologically inclined events. Later on, we might even make this into a cross-platform product. The possibility of this product being used by a considerably large audience is high and we intend to serve them all.

Intrigued enough? Register for the first hack for society here: https://hacksociety.tech/attend/challenges

Follow us on facebook, instagram and twitter for further updates, or join our facebook group to communicate with other like-mided people about this.

Until next time!

Old Nick, HackSociety

Development Challenges — An Alternative to Hackathons? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.