hackSheffield 9

The prize nobody is playing for

Every other award at a hackathon goes to the demo. This one goes to what you would find if you cloned the thing on Monday: the structure, the documentation, the developer experience, whether a stranger can run it.

That is a genuinely different objective and it pulls against the obvious one, because every hour spent on a README is an hour not spent on the thing being shown at the front. We spent them anyway, and it is the award we won.

Why that was not a sacrifice

Four people committing into one repository for twenty-four hours is not a documentation problem, it is a collision problem. Structure is what stops two of you writing the same module and neither of you noticing until the merge. The work that won the repository prize is the same work that let four people move at once, and we would have had to do most of it regardless.

The honest version is that we optimised for not standing on each other, and the prize was for the artefact that fell out of it.

Almost nothing built in twenty-four hours is worth continuing. The ones that are, are the ones you can still read afterwards.

It did not stop at the weekend

The entry became Neighbourly: a map of who needs help and who is nearby, with requests posted by people who need groceries, errands or company, and volunteers picking them up over a real-time chat. That it survived being carried out of the hackathon at all is the strongest evidence I have that the repository work was worth the hours.

Every other entry that weekend was better looking than ours on the Saturday night. The difference showed up on the Monday.