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Comment on Ask HN: Are hackathons anything more than a lame distraction?parent

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The idea that you get things done at Hackathons at crazy speed is at odds with the idea that you start from zero without any preexisting code.

The royal road to fast development is to have a framework ready for the kind of application you're developing, maybe best expressed in this book

https://www.amazon.com/Software-Product-Lines-Practices-Patt...

which was written by the developers of one generation of Visual Studio about the product they wished they could have built (which would have been much much cooler.) Granted there is a problem of training and bringing people on board quickly but that might mean you end up writing a lot of documentation and explaining things to people.

The trick to hackathons is to do a bunch of work up front, so on the day of the hackathon it's

    import pre_hackathon_work as stuff_I_did_during_hackathon.
and then you tweak it a bunch of the course of the hackathon and then you're all set.
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