I’m personally against hackathons. I believe it gives people bad habits of “complete as fast as possible, don’t care about code quality, and plan and code at the same time” mindset. Most hackathons are heavily influenced by cali tech startups’ “ship fast, fix later” mindset.
That’s why I’m doing research instead. It definitely takes longer, but it gives you ability to plan in advance and write good quality of code.
@minsoochoo I'm neither a fan of the concept of competitive hackathons. Nowadays they rarely bring meaningful solutions to the problem at hand and usually result in piles of buzzwords and badly stiched React demos.
I prefer the hackathons as intended by BSD communities: people get together and collaborate to fix bugs or bring improvements to existing open source projects.
@emilianosandri Definitely BSD hackathons are what hackathons should be: sharing ideas and fixing problems together.
Most hackathons in Ontario with high school and undergraduate students aren’t good. Participants think about hackathon ideas in advance, prepare their materials in advance, and make thousands of lines of code that they never understand with LLMs. Then those worst quality of code is grade by “judges”, and if they win the competition, they can add one line of boasting words on their résumé.
The competitions aren’t fair anymore because LLMs writes code for participants. People go hackathons just because they believe that they can get a coop from FAANG companies if they win the “competition”.
Many students in uWaterloo have participated in multiple hackathons. However, when I read their code, I can tell that they have never improved their coding skills by getting reviewed by someone else. Throughout my four years of contribution in the FreeBSD project, many committers/contributors have criticized my patch through review process, and I learned a lot from them. I still see myself as a novice programmer, but I just can’t read any more poor quality code written by those 10x hackathon participants.
@minsoochoo Copy-pasted code has always been an issue in hackathons. Now its LLMs, earlier were pre-made templates downloaded from someone else's GitHub.
On top of that more often than not code or the running software isn't what judges looks at. They're more interested in the idea and how it gets pitched.
How you said if you want to become better at programming contributing to an established OSS project, reading other peoples code and getting feedback is much more valuable than "frankensteining" a demo while fighting against the running clock and sleep deprivation.
By the way, congratulations for your four years of FreeBSD contributions! I'm significantly older than you and I still have to contribute my first commit or my first port to any BSD, I read your Substack and your commitment is admirable, keep on the good work 💪
@minsoochoo @emilianosandri I was certainly grateful for <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=265808#c3> as an outcome from <https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon/202508>.
Benedict was thanked in Bugzilla, and later at <https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/115493256572828740> …
@grahamperrin @emilianosandri
Oh, please don’t misunderstand me. I shouldn’t have generalized all the hackathons.
I love hackathons like FreeBSD’s. But if you come to my university (uWaterloo), you’ll find something very different. I’m scared of future developers around my age because many of them won’t even know how to write good code. LLM-oriented hackathons are ruining the world, and most people around me join them for job opportunity and not for problem solving. This obviously doesn’t help anyone.
@minsoochoo no misunderstanding :-) about the FreeBSD hackathons.
The observation about LLM-oriented hackathons is enlightening. Thanks
Minsoo Choo 
emilianosandri
Graham Perrin