Lesson: Intro to Hacking with Greg Osuri

Step: #4 The Ingredients: The more, the merrier, if well fed with good wifi

To run a good hackathon, I think certainly you need the network, the connectivity, the WiFi, the food, the space, private areas. A good, well structured schedule. People need to know communi-cations. People need to know who to talk to when they have trouble and fun. People are there to have fun on a weekend and I think, making it fun is very, very important.

I think that's one of the things that differentiates Angel Hack from other hackathons. AngelHack is a lot of fun. They are 36 hours. There are games, there are RC choppers, there are Nerf guns, there're water sports, there're massages, for free. There's gourmet food, good beer, bartenders. So it's a very fun-filled event.

Hackathon.io has one of the features where if you're looking for a project, you can go there, and find out about projects that are looking for people, and you can be part of that team. In that way actually a lot of teams are formed even companies are formed that met at a hackathon, went about about raising money after that, and forming a real or-ganization.

Usually you either join a team or people come together, come with an idea, and just form a team right there.

You can use any tool, basically to be minimal as possible to have less friction for using tools. Now, if you don't have any remote teams, you might as well use a pencil and paper to mockup a lot of things, but you have a need to communicate with others. You have to formalize a graphic design package like Balsamiq Mockups or stuff like that.

So, when you start mocking up and communicating these mockups with other people and taking that feedback, it becomes more of a product development versus really hacking. Hacking itself is mostly, you don't do a lot of those things, you just straight get out of the code.