How to improve hackathons (according to devs)
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2025 4:48 am
What matters most to developers? This is a frequent question for my team at Devpost. We recently organized a game-changing hackathon with the goal of finding out what developers really want.
Hosting a hackathon isn’t just about creating an exciting and collaborative event—it's also an opportunity to gather invaluable feedback and insight straight from the developers who use your products. There’s always more to learn, but I’m excited to share our knowledge so you can use this information to host your own hackathon and make it the best possible experience for developers. After all, better hackathons mean more developers are empowered to build great software.
The goals for this hackathon
Coming into this hackathon, we luxembourg telegram screening wanted to look closely at our inputs (i.e., what we have control over) to see how they affect results. After a lot of discussions, our inputs were grouped into:
Reach
Ease of submission
Incentive to submit
Customer support
We needed metrics for these inputs to effectively measure our efforts, but there were no benchmarks for the more abstract inputs—ease of submission and incentive to submit. We needed data to help assess the current state of each.
A hackathon on hackathons?
When it comes to collecting metrics and benchmarks from your user base, there are endless approaches you can take. We initially planned to send out a traditional feedback form and started outlining the details. However, when diving deeper into who to email it to, the incentives for participating, how long to keep the form open, etc., the plan started to look more and more like a hackathon. We’re the home of hackathons and it became clear very quickly that this should be a hackathon, too!
Hosting a hackathon isn’t just about creating an exciting and collaborative event—it's also an opportunity to gather invaluable feedback and insight straight from the developers who use your products. There’s always more to learn, but I’m excited to share our knowledge so you can use this information to host your own hackathon and make it the best possible experience for developers. After all, better hackathons mean more developers are empowered to build great software.
The goals for this hackathon
Coming into this hackathon, we luxembourg telegram screening wanted to look closely at our inputs (i.e., what we have control over) to see how they affect results. After a lot of discussions, our inputs were grouped into:
Reach
Ease of submission
Incentive to submit
Customer support
We needed metrics for these inputs to effectively measure our efforts, but there were no benchmarks for the more abstract inputs—ease of submission and incentive to submit. We needed data to help assess the current state of each.
A hackathon on hackathons?
When it comes to collecting metrics and benchmarks from your user base, there are endless approaches you can take. We initially planned to send out a traditional feedback form and started outlining the details. However, when diving deeper into who to email it to, the incentives for participating, how long to keep the form open, etc., the plan started to look more and more like a hackathon. We’re the home of hackathons and it became clear very quickly that this should be a hackathon, too!