Seeing some good comments and will add to the pile.
IMO it's not a "now" thing. There's a natural ad-hoc, close proximity vibe that some gatherings have. They often come with everything else, including flow and good (best of this kind) memories.
I imagine some of these were called hackathons and some LAN parties, etc. Nevertheless it's not a straightforward thing to recreate artificially. Unfortunately most public / large "hackathons" I went to were failed attempts.
I've had the great experience of growing up in eastern Europe in 90s and 00s and so in highschool if you qualified for the higher stages of CS olympiads you were allowed to skip classes and spend time in the "lab" with the other "olympics". That was the first "hackathon", basically sometimes a few weeks in a row of coding with everyone else from 8AM till whenever you were in trouble if you didn't get home. Sometimes playing Doom, sometimes with the teachers, but most times coding. It was ... "electric" - unfortunately I don't have writing skills to make justice to it.
Then there were the LAN parties and those were very good too, and so on.
I've actually been through a few hackathons at work that were pretty good.
Every time they are with the people you know well and few more (1-2) degrees of separation, but always with a shared goal and nothing else but the pure shared goal of the hackatahon. Everyone is already fluent and will hit the ground running, etc. Otherwise it's bunch of people that never worked together, not "style" cohhesion, etc. fucking around trying to figure out stuff that should already be in place for a proper hackathon.
I could go on and think I'd probably have a few good things to add here, but wouldn't be sure that it's a "solution", just some facts from my own experience.
But man, those days in the "lab" doing CS problems, they gave me the "high" for what coding can be like for the rest of my life. I don't need more than 15s of that to want to GO, haha :)
IMO it's not a "now" thing. There's a natural ad-hoc, close proximity vibe that some gatherings have. They often come with everything else, including flow and good (best of this kind) memories.
I imagine some of these were called hackathons and some LAN parties, etc. Nevertheless it's not a straightforward thing to recreate artificially. Unfortunately most public / large "hackathons" I went to were failed attempts.
I've had the great experience of growing up in eastern Europe in 90s and 00s and so in highschool if you qualified for the higher stages of CS olympiads you were allowed to skip classes and spend time in the "lab" with the other "olympics". That was the first "hackathon", basically sometimes a few weeks in a row of coding with everyone else from 8AM till whenever you were in trouble if you didn't get home. Sometimes playing Doom, sometimes with the teachers, but most times coding. It was ... "electric" - unfortunately I don't have writing skills to make justice to it. Then there were the LAN parties and those were very good too, and so on.
I've actually been through a few hackathons at work that were pretty good.
Every time they are with the people you know well and few more (1-2) degrees of separation, but always with a shared goal and nothing else but the pure shared goal of the hackatahon. Everyone is already fluent and will hit the ground running, etc. Otherwise it's bunch of people that never worked together, not "style" cohhesion, etc. fucking around trying to figure out stuff that should already be in place for a proper hackathon.
I could go on and think I'd probably have a few good things to add here, but wouldn't be sure that it's a "solution", just some facts from my own experience.
But man, those days in the "lab" doing CS problems, they gave me the "high" for what coding can be like for the rest of my life. I don't need more than 15s of that to want to GO, haha :)