I agree - The weird thing is I have a google account that I use for work, but I'm not comfortable using it to sign up to other services. Where as I have no issues signing up for things with GitHub.
If developers are incentives by the possibility of winning $1m, they would start working months in advance. That's why it's not ok to offer $1m as a hackathon prize, as it's not in the spirit of hacking.
I think you could offer 1million but it has to be a competition where the teams that enter solve a single problem. That way accurate scoring metrics can be developed and used.
It doesn't make sense to say "Hackathon, 1 million dollars, Go!".
edit: To add. The problem should be announced the day of!
I guess that it's better to allow much more time for bigger prizes. Like the Netflix prize. That was a great mix of marketing and feeding the recommender system.
That's kind of nitpicky. My point was that if there is a hackathon with a highly desirable prize, and you know about it in advance, there is a direct incentive for you to spend time between the time you learn of the hack and the time when the hack officially begins working on ideas, designs, business strategy, and even code, and that that effect is the reason that it's not a good idea, or in the spirit of hacking, to offer high stakes prizes in hackathon style situations.
Apologies for the very long sentence, I love commas and am the arch-nemesis of conciseness.
I didn't make it that far, but with 62 words per minute. As the worlds started piling atop each other, the greatest difficulty was trying to figure out which word it believed you were working on to finish it up.
Good on you. Getting experience is so important; I see too many compsci grads with little experience and little actual programming exposure on their degrees that they're almost unemployable.
Yeah, it's great to be earning money, but I put a lot of work into it, and I feel like there's a huge opportunity cost. I don't have time to socialise. I don't mean "oh, I can't go to the SU pub every night", I mean I haven't had any time for any recreational activity in the past 7 weeks, apart from one hackathon. I don't have time to go to the gym, I barely have the opportunity to go shopping (which has led to me putting on weight because of takeaway meals and fast food).
So yeah, it is great to have an income as a student, particularly in London. I wouldn't be able to pay my rent otherwise, the student loan is totally insufficient for even rent alone, let alone other expenses on top of that. But there is a major downside as well.
Well I disagree here, I managed to pull through 4 years without maintenance loan, income, or much support from my parents. You can live on £2 or even £1 a day if you organise well and eat things way worse than takeaway.
Back on topic, it depends what year are you in. If youre going for an internship between 2nd and 3rd year (and you should), you can easily spend most of 1st and 2nd year socialising and intern/3rd working hard and still get a solid 1st degree
I'm in second year, and I'm getting solid first marks. You probably could spend most of first and second year socialising if you don't have a job, but I do. Living on £1 a day in London including rent? That's not possible, even with very cheap place to live, £400pm for arguments sake, although that's probably not realistic you're already at nearly £13 a day. Even cheap halls at £99pw are more expensive than that. To live on £1 a day just covering rent with no extra costs, your rent would have to be at a maximum £28 p/m. You certainly can't socialise on that kind of money.
If you meant excluding rent and bills, say they cost £15/day (which is still unrealistically cheap), plus your £1 for living expenses, that's a monthly cost of £480. Per academic year, that costs about £3840. While this is well within the threshold of the maximum student maintenance loan, remember you'll still have to pay travel costs (you can't really stay within walking distance of your house for the entire time you're in London), buy books (which can get very expensive), pay for other materials for coursework. At a minimum. University, and living in London generally is very expensive...
Mostly, I'm just thinking, how do you even eat on £1 a day? That's pretty much one tin of baked beans plus a slice or two of bread per day. Or maybe some rice. Luckily nobody has to pay medical costs here...
Also, I'm interested as to whether or not you think a gap year internship is still really important if I'm already working? I've had two jobs so far, that's quite a lot of experience for someone who's only in second year, and a lot more than many graduates I know...
first of all yes, i think internship is worth it for a) experience in a company/corporate environment, which you cant get on your own, and b) a famous company's name on your cv. i was at O2, would never work there, hate corporations, but it helped me massively in getting a job and taught me a lot of things.
plus youll earn some money which you can spend in the 3rd year (typical intern pay for programmers is £15-20k)
and yeah that was without the bills. i lived in houses close to uni to avoid commuting and the £400 was common if not a bit steep, but i suppose my uni wasnt in central (it was brunel in uxbridge). also i lived in pretty shitty houses, because hey, im only there for a year, but on the upside met lots of cool people.
a key to eating cheap is buying in bulk and cooking large amounts of food. say you buy 10 or even 20kg bag of rice (i used to do it on indian holidays for better discounts), that will cost less than £10 and last a few good months. get some canned veg, maybe micne. big tescos in poorer areas are your friend. its hard to calculate but for around £7 (and certainly for £10) you can stir up enough to last you a week. shits not gonna be gourmet but it works.
there are other ways too... freeganism, putting stuff through self checkout as onions, etc.
I should contextualise why I feel this is a bit low - I met a 16yo iOS developer last week who was telling me how he had to turn down a £50,000 3 month contract because he wanted to focus on his A Levels.
Can we not just say 'people'? I'm a programmer, and I'm male, but I'm not a male programmer. They're entirely separate things. My programming is completely and utterly unrelated to my gender. I work with lots of other fantastic minds, and their gender couldn't make less of a difference to their skills. You don't have to be a certain gender to do a certain thing - isn't that the whole message of equality?
Unfortunately trying to have this attitude ignores the real-life differences in people's attitudes toward women and men programmers. For example, even if you are very careful to treat all programmers fairly, there are still many other people who would look at a woman programmer and automatically have doubts about her competency and look for errors in her work, since they have a mental model of women not being good at programming, while the same person may look at a male programmer and see him as normal and probably competent unless he shows otherwise.
That mental model is partially related to the mythology and stories that we tell about ourselves, and this article is a thought experiment in seeing how it feels to glorify women's participation in the way that we glorify men's participation.
If you're interested in learning about this, here is a list of some experiences that are different for women and men programmers: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Male_Programmer_Privilege... - not all items apply to all people, but that it conveys an understanding of differences that happen.
