I'm Jewish and all these "weekend hackathons" leave me half as much time as those who participate the whole time. Because I don't work from friday night to say night, I basically have less time to complete the project. I view that as an additional challenge.
At TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, which I attended every year, the first time I built a real-time, quora-like Q&A app with questions of the type "What is the Adj Noun in Noun", which invited people via chat requests. The second time I built "spreadourmessage.com" which generated a widget organizations could place on their page to let people "donate their fb profiles to syndicate some organizationms posts. Neither one won anything. The third year I realized many people were cheating and using existing sites, so I updated our existing app, YouMixer.com (which doesn't work well with fb connect anymore) and presented a real time social jukebox backed by youtube like a free itunes. Didn't win either.
This year I'm going to build something from scratch using a sponsor's API and our Q framework (http://qbixstaging.com/QP) if it does its job, this should beat the pants off the other entries.
At the danger of sounding insensitive, you can't schedule these things to make everybody happy. Shift workers, doctors and nurses, there are lots of people who don't have "free" weekends. Like you, I also have a weekend hobby that conflicts with LD. This year, I'm going to miss out on most of Saturday again, but I came to the conclusion that in the end it can be a good thing - it forces you to work in a more economical manner. I'd take the Jam, however, not the Compo (with more time being the only deciding factor).
Yeah, I don't expect the time of the "weekend hackathon" to change. I am fine with this. Although it would be nice to have an option for diff people to take different days since it's all in good fun. What kind of irks me is that many hackathons seem to have winners decided by other criteria than the ones they state...
I know what you mean. LD is probably a lot fairer and more transparent than most though, because of the way voting is conducted. I also think it's one where "winning" doesn't matter as much. If you compare that to some sponsored events where the winners seem to be determined beforehand... I take LD over them anytime.
Of course, LD is susceptible to populistic/marketing style attacks, but not as much as it would seem (otherwise the guys who did Impetus would have won last time).
At TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, which I attended every year, the first time I built a real-time, quora-like Q&A app with questions of the type "What is the Adj Noun in Noun", which invited people via chat requests. The second time I built "spreadourmessage.com" which generated a widget organizations could place on their page to let people "donate their fb profiles to syndicate some organizationms posts. Neither one won anything. The third year I realized many people were cheating and using existing sites, so I updated our existing app, YouMixer.com (which doesn't work well with fb connect anymore) and presented a real time social jukebox backed by youtube like a free itunes. Didn't win either.
This year I'm going to build something from scratch using a sponsor's API and our Q framework (http://qbixstaging.com/QP) if it does its job, this should beat the pants off the other entries.