Is a Hackathon of interest at all to Language Developers?

Hi,

I'm posting into this forum because I know more developers read this one, so please read on, your opinion is very valuable for us.

Earlier this year we ran a hackathon in San Francisco during SDL Innovate. We put quite a lot of effort into seeing who could attend and who could not, and as most of our developers are in Europe we unsurprisingly had plenty of comments that if the event was in Europe then it would be easier to attend (we did have some Language Developers attend that though and I believe they got a lot from it). So, in September we are planning to run a Hackathon in Europe, in Amsterdam.... hopefully you are all aware of this as it's been advertised in here and we sent mailers to all the registered developers.

To register for the event you go here and click on register.

Unfortunately so far we don't have anyone registered from the Language Community, so this of course makes us wonder if there is any interest at all?  So I've got two questions I'm pondering with:

  1. Are you guys interested in a Hackathon or is this something more interesting for independent professional developers?  I mean professional because I'm assuming you mostly have day jobs and developing is just part of your role and you do it because it helps you integrate your systems and create tools plugins that help you in your day jobs.  Taking time out for this isn't interesting or you don't have the control over your time for something like this.
  2. What can we do that would be of benefit to a developer community like this?  What can we provide to help you improve your skills and get more out of the solutions we are providing?

You can see I'm of the opinion we don't have too many full time developers working for themselves in here. But perhaps I'm wrong and you're all too busy to see the things we are doing to try and help grow the community.

I'm, we're, interested in your feedback so I hope you can take the time to respond and help us get a handle on what we should be doing that would be of more interest for the Language Community of Developers.

Looking forward to your feedback...

Parents
  • Hello Paul,

    I can speak only for myself, but I guess, generally the point you make about most language developers being not full time independent professional developers is correct.

    If I look at my own situation, I am clearly project driven when it comes to developing a tool etc. So, if there is a project I can do for a customer I sit down and write the code. Most of the time, though, I do something else for a living and since there is not much money in selling add-on tools, it is at most a side business and has the "hobby" feel to it.

    This is, why I would not dare to measure my coding skills against those of a professional developer in the course of a hackathon. In addition, I do not meet some of the prerequisites such as having an online code repository etc. I do not even use a programming language that serious developers would acknowledge as a "real" programming language (I still happily use VB.net;-)).

    So, all in all - the SDL Hackathon feels like something that is not for me and my skill level but more like what professional developers would go for.

    One more thing is the timing: I would need to know about an event at least 2 or 3 months ahead in order to plan it in, otherwise chances are that the dates are already booked by a customer (which is the case this time as well).

    And last but not least, I am not such a frequent events visitor. I have problems doing a lot of "small talk" and often I am distracted by my daily business and get into writing emails, working on issues etc. etc. while sitting and trying to listen to a presentation. This is why I rather seldomly go to events if I am not a speaker myself.

    Generally, I like the idea of the Hackathon, though - its great that you organise something like this and I wish you all the best with it!

    Cheers,
    Tom

Reply
  • Hello Paul,

    I can speak only for myself, but I guess, generally the point you make about most language developers being not full time independent professional developers is correct.

    If I look at my own situation, I am clearly project driven when it comes to developing a tool etc. So, if there is a project I can do for a customer I sit down and write the code. Most of the time, though, I do something else for a living and since there is not much money in selling add-on tools, it is at most a side business and has the "hobby" feel to it.

    This is, why I would not dare to measure my coding skills against those of a professional developer in the course of a hackathon. In addition, I do not meet some of the prerequisites such as having an online code repository etc. I do not even use a programming language that serious developers would acknowledge as a "real" programming language (I still happily use VB.net;-)).

    So, all in all - the SDL Hackathon feels like something that is not for me and my skill level but more like what professional developers would go for.

    One more thing is the timing: I would need to know about an event at least 2 or 3 months ahead in order to plan it in, otherwise chances are that the dates are already booked by a customer (which is the case this time as well).

    And last but not least, I am not such a frequent events visitor. I have problems doing a lot of "small talk" and often I am distracted by my daily business and get into writing emails, working on issues etc. etc. while sitting and trying to listen to a presentation. This is why I rather seldomly go to events if I am not a speaker myself.

    Generally, I like the idea of the Hackathon, though - its great that you organise something like this and I wish you all the best with it!

    Cheers,
    Tom

Children