This article was taken from the June 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Hackathons, where developers and designers come together for 48 hours or so to collaborate on a coding task, can lead to powerful tangential thinking and intriguing solutions -- or an ill-focused orgy of pizza consumption. James Gill, cofounder of analytics company GoSquared and organiser of the London Real-Time hackathon, gives his tips on avoiding the latter.
1. Focus with APIs
Choose one or a series of application programming interfaces (APIs), and make all the info on them available ahead of the event so people can prepare. Try to get the API creators to help when things go wrong: "It can be really frustrating when you're hacking something and find that an API function is broken," says Gill.
2. Kick out recruiters
Big companies might send down recruiters to tap up the talent -- but get rid of them. "They really turn people off and make them angry," says Gill, who instead created good vibes with barbecues, coffees, "the biggest order that Ocado had ever done" -- and also by helping out those who were hacking his GoSquared API.
3. Get filming
Gill created a progress video each day, which catalysed creativity. "We'd catch up with a lot of the individual teams, they would talk about what they'd done so far, and it would build up this story. They'd think, 'What are we going to say, how can we show our progress?' It made people think about their hack and got them excited."
4 Make something sexy
Gill says the most memorable hacks are those that visually stun the crowd. "People built interesting back-end services that did powerful stuff, but because they weren't visual, they didn't demo well. People loved the iPad drum-machine app, but something that compiled JavaScript didn't excite the crowd or judges as much."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
