Hackathons Rise in Popularity Among Budding Entrepreneurs
Hackathons are rising in popularity among budding entrepreneurs, as these weekend coding camps are becoming more accessible and diverse, engaging more women and cropping up at public libraries and even laundromats.
Once relegated to computer science majors, hackathons now span the country as each weekend thousands of them are available and often for free or a nominal fee. As they gain acceptance among the more creative types who might be more interested in design or creating logos, hackathons now give teams of people with disparate backgrounds an opportunity to debug a line of code or find and develop a solution in a short period of time.
When 14-year old Angie Wang attended iOSDevCamp in 2011, her first coding camp, she teamed up with her 12-year old sister, Maggie. Angie Wang has attended nearly every one during the past five years and credits the San Jose, Calif. hackathon for spurring her to study computer science, which she is now majoring in at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The weekend event also helped her to later create Educrest, an app that helps students learn the basics of computer science through tutorials and quizzes.
"iOSDevCamp introduced me to the excitement of using technology to see my ideas come to life," she said. "We need more empathy to figure out what problems we want to use technology to solve."
Wang has returned year after year, because the hackathon is not about winning prizes, but being a part of a community and a "diverse network of professionals and students who have since become my mentors and friends. We've become like tech buddies who catch up once a year. It doesn't matter where you come from, just as long as you're enthusiastic about bringing a cool idea to fruition," she said.
Coders were often highly competitive when hackathons first started more than a decade ago, but as more women and even children as young as five years old are participating in them nowadays, the aim is to collaborate and share each person's expertise so that all the ideas are transformed into an app by the end of the weekend on Sunday, said Dom Sagolla, a co-founder of iOSDevCamp.
"Our goal is to include as many people as possible in the developer community, especially those who might not consider themselves coders," he said.
At iOSDevCamp, any of the hundreds of people can walk up to the open mike and ask a question and there's a good chance that someone else has the knowledge or background to help solve their issue, no matter how minute or mundane it may appear.
"We encourage collaboration and cooperation as much as we can to create an air of friendly competition during our events," Sagolla said. "Lots of open source code is used but code is also generated by the group."
Back in 2007, only a handful of the people attending were women, but as the hackathon gained popularity, 25% of the 250 people attending last year were women, including a seven-year old girl. Sagolla stresses the importance of having a wide variety of people learn how to work together, but each one of these weekends, including the tenth one this year which takes place July 22 to 24 at PayPal's office, is about how strangers can learn to work together.
"It's amazing what can get done in 48 hours with the right mix of talent, creativity and vision," he said. "Our job as organizers of a hackathon contest is to pair people with complimentary experiences and skills often bringing together people who might never have found each other."
The impetus for people to work together in small teams generates a positive environment, said Perrine Crampton, a community relations manager for Citrix Systems, a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based software company.
"It's not a me-against-you atmosphere, and women have felt more welcome at this hackathon than at other events," said Crampton, who has attended for five years as a volunteer and when she represented PayPal as an event manager. "Everyone wants you to succeed."
Creating a community atmosphere also generates more goodwill and less competition because "in the end, everyone wants an inspiring glimpse of the future and we are all rooting for each other to win," Sagolla said. "Our focus is on the process of building, the teams themselves and their attitude — we are not only concerned with the cool stuff that gets built."
The group gathers on Friday and listens to a 30-second pitch that evening and as the coders become more familiar with each other the next day, people start reaching out. Volunteering your capability in debugging a line of code or another technical issue to another team earns that person a ticket and by Sunday, the software developer who receives the most of them wins the "Most Helpful" prize, which includes software or hardware from a sponsor.
Some groups are still tinkering and refining their app until minutes before they get on stage on Sunday and present their app.
"During the past decade, our community has seen everything from billion dollar teams that have gone public to childhood dreams and all else in between from these idea contests," he said. "The one thing that all of our winners and successful sponsors have in common is persistence because they never give up."
When Claire Comins brought her 13-year-old daughter and her friend to the hackathon three years ago, she found a collaborative environment where coders, designers and mentors all work together by sharing ideas and technical skills.
Her daughter and teenage friend created a demonstration of a storytelling app and Comins, the founder of rafiakids.com, a San Rafael, Calif.-based education tech company which offers maker and coding classes for children, was impressed by how everyone took their ideas seriously despite their age.
"The girls finished the weekend very confident with their pitch and got a real idea of what the process of making an app involved," she said.
Other Locations to Learn How to Code
The surge of interest in learning how to code has prompted one-day courses to weekend hackathons which occur often wherever organizers can obtain free space. Libraries are taking part and offering free coding classes ranging from beginner levels to more specific ones such as javascript even in towns such as Piscataway, N.J. Community colleges, children's museums and non-profit organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club or YMCA offer STEM activities and local STEM programs can be found through The Connectory, a national database.
Charleston Women in Tech, a non-profit organization, started providing free coding classes this year through a program called Coding in Our Neighborhoods (CodeON) in a laundromat named Laundry Matters to children who lack access to Wifi at home or school. The classes are held in the neighborhoods where the students live, eliminating obstacles of finding transportation.
Software developers who are eager to pursue a career in programming should subscribe to an open course at universities such as MIT, listen to a podcast, immerse themselves in a two-day course or "find a buddy at a hackathon," Sagolla said. Enrolling in a coding school can set people back by $12,000 or more in student loans and is not always the best strategy to pursue.
"There are better ways to do it than spending money," he said. "Try everything that is free first. Schools are an accelerant and you first need to have the bare resources such as discipline and context, community and support when you fail. Coding is less about learning and is more akin to performing music. You have to practice to improve."