The word Hackathon is derived from the word Marathon (a long or difficult activity in a short period) and Hack here means as exploratory programming.
During a Hackathon, programmers spend a small period, generally between 24-48h (it can last up to a week), building, creating and delivering a particular product. The thought is to code in collaboration in a significant way, start from basics and finish with a functional prototype. It is a kind of competition, where a group of programmers, developers, designers and project managers come together to design and construct an excellent product, a software project. In the beginning, it started in the open source group of people and today is incredibly common among programmers. Users can find all kinds of hackathons; some are mostly for educational purposes, others for social purposes and others primarily to create software. Very often, companies utilize it as a chance to get innovative ideas from their staff, a kind of prototype that will be inexpensive at the end of the day.
During these events, people face several real-life problems. They could find Hackathons that have an assigned theme and have others where there are no topics and, therefore, will propose ideas and build on that. It is a vast opportunity to gather a large number of users to address the same problem and observe how ideas and results flow.
What are the benefits of Hackathons?
1. Meet new people: – It is a great chance to meet other people who have the same interests in one particular technology and who be concerned about the same techniques. Mainly, it is a place where people have the opportunity to work and work together on projects with like-minded people. Peoples will not go over the profit of making new connections and networks, but a Hackathon tool is a right place for that.
2. Team collaboration: – People find themselves in a condition where they work deeply with new people they know for many consecutive hours in a small period, which makes everything quite powerful. Everyone is working for the same objective. Very often people create strong bonds, learn from the strengths of others and learn how to work with other peoples with whom they have never worked before, where high communication skills will be input.
3. Add value to CV:- This is an excellent addition to a person’s CV: he will get a real technology experience and will be able to win prizes. People in the field know that throughout a Hackathon it increase their knowledge and gain experience of teamwork. It explains a lot about their personality, a proof that a participant is a person who takes the initiative, seeks to have depth knowledge and like challenges.
4. Innovation:- Problem-solving environments give confidence to the development of new ideas. A person works with people who come from various fields, with unique and different ideas and interests, all working jointly to resolve the same problem, and each adds his own opinion. The reality that Hackathon restricted with time enhances the adrenaline and makes it more productive.
5. Employer’s mark:- If a person organizes the event in their offices, people with talent in the business will know that person’s company and will meet with their employees, which will allow them to see how their team works and the skills they have.
6. Recruiting and finding talent:- During the project, in some way, many organizations can see it as if a company were testing candidates and identifying new abilities for their business teams. Something that cannot be observes throughout a job interview. Here, various companies can see how peoples work in action, how they handle a situation, how quick they are, how productive they are, etc. So it’s a competent way to find talent.
7. Creating a new product:-The basic idea is to resolve a problem by constructing a product. So people end up with a prototype of what could be their next product! And if not, at least they do not know what worked and what did not.
8. Personal satisfaction:-Peoples are having fun building new things, and the feeling is quite satisfying. They gain respect from others for the work they do and contribute to the advancement of technology.
Things that needed:-
The base of hackathons is in open source projects, and they stand out especially in the context of the development of Opens. Recently, several companies implement the concept of Hackathon, to find out the best potential of the workers of a company. Some see a hackathon as a method to allow development teams to work on various selected projects. Those who do not propose it see it as a bastardization of the concept, given that a company owns the results of the work. Such critics cynically consider hackathons only as a way for a company to get free of cost developer work through a weekend or a holiday.