First-Time Judge Experience
Recently, I did something that I never thought I was going to do before, which was being a judge at a hackathon. For many years, I’ve been on the other end of just making projects and hoping they were good enough to win the hackathon, but I was lucky enough to be able to actually be a judge at a hackathon. I have judged over 12 projects and I want to talk about them, so let’s get into it.
So I guess the first question is, where was the hackathon hosted? It was hosted at Hunter College. They had a lot of nice people running the show.
Judges, Pairings, and Teams
There were 10 judges consisting of developers and professors from the school. Every judge was paired up, so in my case, I was lucky enough to have a professor from the school. He was very knowledgeable, had a lot of insight, and he was very nice to talk to. I think there were about 35 teams in total, which is a good number for a hackathon.
Memorable Projects
There were a lot of interesting projects. One of them was a local bartering app. If you have any food you don’t want, maybe someone else can offer you a different type of food, and you can have a nice exchange where you’re both happy. The goal was to reduce the amount of food that New York throws out in general.
There was another product that was very provoking. When creating an issue on GitHub, an AI bot will open up a PR and that PR contains the fix of the issue, so a developer can go in and check the PR to see if the solution was good enough. There could be some benefit to it, like if a product manager or anyone who isn’t very technical in the team uses it. But the big flaw I see is AI having trouble understanding where the code fix is going to go. In big enterprise code bases, a project is over 2000 files long and writing down updates on a button color might be very difficult due to the fact there are so many buttons. The product manager would have to have enough context to know which file the change would be going into and at that point the product manager doesn't fall under the categories of not very technical. There are a lot of flaws in the project, but I really do think it has potential.
Judging Process and Ceremony
There were two rounds for the judging process. The first round was all 8 projects per group of two judges, and the second round was a more refined one that the other judges judged, that consisted of about 3 teams.
After all that, we had our closing ceremony. They had a lot of prizes: a few monitors, mouse, chargers. They gave a shout-out to all the judges and mentors for being there, which was very nice. At the end, I really liked that they had handwritten cards for each judge. It had a personalized thank-you letter inside it, which felt very personal.
Final Thoughts
Overall, honestly, for the first hackathon, being a judge was a lot more fun than I realized. It’s really nice to be in that position. It's interesting to see what people can cook up in 24–48 hours and loaded on caffeine. It felt like a breath of fresh air to meet some people in the field who have a common understanding of what you do. I might do it again. I may also drag a friend with me to do it and see what they think about it. I guess we’ll see what happens next
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