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In the past four weekends—since college started—I’ve went to three hackathons in three wonderful places: Cornell, Canada, and Michigan. And hackathon season has just begun.

There’s a lot of very common questions I get for spending almost all my weekends travelling to places as far as Canada (maybe even Shanghai this November!). I’m just going to go through all of them here:

What is a hackathon?

A hackathon is an event, typically lasting at least 24 hours, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming. In other words, it’s an event you go to, make teams with people you may or may not know, and try to make anything you want. At the end of the set time period, we all go and present our creations and the good ones might win prizes. It sounds like the entire thing’s just a competition, but trust me, it’s much more than that.

How do you do it?

Almost all of the far-away hackathons I’ve been to and plan to go to pay for all my travel, food, and living expenses. As for being able to have the free time for all these hackathons, I do my homework the instant it’s assigned. It also helps that there’s a class on Fridays that I am able to take on Thursdays, thus enabling me to have a three day weekend. It also helps that the courseload so far in college is ridiculously easy and that I love going to these events.

Why do you do it?

This will be a long answer. My rate of improving my programming skills increase tremendously when I’m in hackathons. When you surround yourself with motivated and smart people, it’s a lot more easier to program and be productive. Thus, it would be wise for me to go to more hackathons because I want to learn more programming tools faster. Adding onto that, they’re bloody fun times. I get to meet people from totally faraway places. For instance, I’ve talked to hackers who came all the way from South Korea and England.

Another reason why I am going to all these hackathons is because making things is fun for me. There’s something magical that happens when you’re building something you actually care about with a team. Your project develops a life of its own and you get to show it to others and see all the awesome things other people have made.

This reason should be a good enough reason alone. I basically get to travel everywhere for free. When you’re travelling, you realize that the time you spend in the places you visit is limited. As a result, every second counts, and you end up seeing things in new and more positive ways. I played tennis at 2 AM in the morning and saw a couple deer in Michigan. Hack the North’s poutine was simply amazing (albeit unhealthy haha). And Cornell is very attractive. On my bus ride to here I stared out the window for a hour because all the trees made a mosaic of fall colors—you tend to forget that it’s now autumn in New York City. Earlier today a friend and I were watching the sun slowly dive into the hilly horizon from the top of the Slope as a meteorite passed by above it. It’s all these small things that add up to what makes traveling fantastic.

There’s several other reasons but the biggest of them all is that I’m visiting friends in these colleges. Most of these friends are family to me and have made a huge impact to who I am today. It’s refreshing seeing them after several months. Although it’s saddening to know that our paths might not intersect again as we’ll probably stay in different colleges, it’s great seeing them all be happy and doing well. I’m so happy for them all.

How many hackathons have you been to?

I’ll see if I can list all the ones I remember that I’ve gone to and all the ones I plan to go to and continue to update this post in the future.

1. Codeday New York Spring
2. HackBCA
3. HackNYU
4. Codeday New York Summer
5. YoHackEAST
6. Battlehacks Boston
7. Breaking Barriers Hackathon
8. MHacks
9. Hack the North
10. Cornell BigRedApps
11. HackNY
12. Intel Internet of Things hackathon
13. YHack
14. HackRPI
15. Codeday
16. LocalHackDay
17. MHacks V
18. HackCooper
19. McHacks
20. IronHacks (mentor)
21. HackNY
22. HackBCA (mentor)
23. defhacks (mentor)
24. Angelhack Brooklyn
25. Spotify Monthly Music Hackathon
26. Angelhack Manhattan
27. Battlehack NYC
28. Hack the Planet

Can I do the same?

Totally! Make sure that your health and schoolwork comes first though. You don’t have to know how to program to go to a hackathon. Just take the leap and enter the earliest and closest hackathon to you. You won’t regret it. Contact me if you have any questions.

~ Brian Chuk