Hackathons shouldn't be for finished products. They should be for exploration and prototyping, which by its nature involves cutting corners and skipping stuff that's not on the critical path.
As a tech writer, I used one hackathon to set up a different build system (later improved and now in use) and one to prototype a significant doc refactoring (actually implemented a year later). Hackaathons can work for doc, and UI design, and QA, and others. We have this chicken-and-egg thing where hackathons are for dev so they're scheduled for dev, so it's harder for others to participate, so non-devs don't show up so hackathons are for dev and should be scheduled... I've intentionally broken into hackathons a few times, in part to try to break this cycle and get other writers involved, but so far no one else has joined in. :-( (QA has, though, which is good.)
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Date: 2020-08-17 01:40 pm (UTC)Hackathons shouldn't be for finished products. They should be for exploration and prototyping, which by its nature involves cutting corners and skipping stuff that's not on the critical path.
As a tech writer, I used one hackathon to set up a different build system (later improved and now in use) and one to prototype a significant doc refactoring (actually implemented a year later). Hackaathons can work for doc, and UI design, and QA, and others. We have this chicken-and-egg thing where hackathons are for dev so they're scheduled for dev, so it's harder for others to participate, so non-devs don't show up so hackathons are for dev and should be scheduled... I've intentionally broken into hackathons a few times, in part to try to break this cycle and get other writers involved, but so far no one else has joined in. :-( (QA has, though, which is good.)