How come so few of you have been to a hackday?
I go to quite a few hackdays, and as we all live in our own little bubbles to a certain degree. It was really interesting for me to discover something the other day. I was speaking at Generate Conference, .net Magazine’s new conference, and I asked a simple question. The question I asked was how many in the room had ever been to a hackday? I was extremely surprised with the answer. Off the 150 or so audience members only 4 people put up their hands. That’s less than 3% of the audience.
Finding this fewer number of hackday participants at Generate Conference was a shock to me, and it made me think.
Why?
This is an honest question, please let me know on twitter @sydlawrence. I’ll update the post with any questions and my responses.
I have a few thoughts of my own. Is it for any of these reasons?
Too Competitive?
I’m not good enough?
Why should I bother?
I don’t know about them until it’s too late?
I’m quite happy hacking at home thank you very much!
But I’m not a coder
To answer most of these questions let me first explain to you why I think you should go to hackdays.
I think hackdays are a great place to learn new things, meet new people and play around with technology in an unpressurised manner. They only have to be competitive if you make them competitive. As with all things, there are sometimes competitive people. When you are at hackday you can often get help from other people. I was once working on a hack using a library and the creator of the library was literally sat next to me. They could easily help me with any issues that arose.
Learn new things
Over the past few years I’ve been to quite a few hackdays. This has often been the first place I have ever used new technologies, such as Oculus VR, quadcopters, WebGL, arduinos, web sockets, and many others. Winning hackdays for me, is totally not the be all and end all. I’ve been to quite a few hackdays being ineligible for prizes right from the beginning. For example, the other week I was hacked.io teams had to be no more than 4 people. My team was 10 of us, all working on a heath robinson (rube goldberg) machine, did we turn up wanting to win? Hell no. We wanted to make something awesome, with people we’d never worked with before, to learn something new.
Meet new people
I’ve met people from all around the world from loads of companies. Such as some guys from Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, rdio, Deezer, SoundCloud, EchoNest, SendGrid (and of course Twilio before I joined them) and have even worked with them on hacks.
Apart from having made loads of new friends by going to hackdays, I’ve also “strengthened” relationships. Both Adz & Paul started working with me at WMAS after I worked with them on hacks at hackdays. We could all easily ascertain our skills and weaknesses from working with each other.
You learn from others and they learn from you
I’ve learnt many things from other people at hackdays, and have also helped many others. One guy came up to me and didn’t know how to program. He had a hack in mind ArtSMS. I taught him there and then, and a few hours later he wrote his first ever bit of code, his first app. He made an app that if you SMSed it it would reply back to you with a random bit of art from tumblr.
You get help from others and you give to help others
You might have an idea, and others might not. They might have a different set of skillsets. They could be a designer, or a developer, you could be a designer or a developer, or you may possess one or many of many other skillsets.
Just because you aren’t a developer does not mean you aren’t invited to the party. Quite the opposite, there are very few “non” coder participants and there could easily do with being more.
So, if there are any other reasons for it, please let me know. I am genuinely interested. If you make time for conferences and not for hackdays, I would like to know why, personally, I find hackdays much more beneficial and rewarding than tech conferences.
UPDATES WITH Q&A
@noel_lyons said: “Because we don’t get invited :(”
Noel, as far as I am aware, most of the hackdays are an open invite. Sure, not all, but most are. I notice that you are in London, so check out this lanyrd page for upcoming hackdays near you.