User groups.................
Make cool things and stretch your skills with other enthusiastic hackers.
Les Pounder goes off on a personal hackathon, but his copy is never late.
Conferences and Barcamps are great, you get to meet and chat with your peers while learning some new skills. But where can you put those skills to the test? Well, one of those places is Hackathons.
These happen all over the world and generally focus on either a language or a topic. At some events you’ll find hackathons happening in parallel, either officially or unofficially. PyCon UK’s Education track, for instance, has seen teachers and developers hacking together to make cool projects based around Python and the Raspberry Pi.
At OggCamp, children were encouraged to take apart cheap electronic toys and turn them into something else. Another hackathon is Hack Manchester, a 24-hour coding event where developers create projects and applications that meet a public need. This event has also spawned a junior event for children to learn hacking and coding skills from industry professionals. Hackathons are great for children, they work in teams to solve problems from their perspective, using tools as diverse as Scratch to Arduino. Every child will have their own ideas and some of those ideas will truly blow you away in their complexity and focus.
Hackathons are great for personal development, in fact they force you to think of solutions to problems that you may not have faced before. Working with new people and throwing around crazy project ideas is the best way to re-discover your love for computing and coding. If you have the chance to visit a Hackathon, and we have a few suggestions below, then do it—you will love every second of it!