How I'm Running a Software Jam in a World of Slop<br>Jun 25, 2026<br>How I'm Running a Software Jam in a World of Slop
Related to RIP software hackathons. Long live the<br>hardware<br>hackathon.,<br>I agree most software hackathons are busted, this is how I’m running one<br>anyway.
Running a hackathon, software jam, or some assorted code adjacent competition<br>has gotten significantly more awkward as of late. Stop me if you’ve ever heard<br>of of the story of the AI B2B SAAS winning the competition, as the judges<br>starry eyed fell in love with a ChatGPT wrapper. This sucks, but I still wake<br>up every day and love software. There’s a craft to it, there’s still passion &<br>people pouring hours of their life into making high quality software. I still<br>want to write code. If you work in any field barring webdev it’s clear that<br>software is not a solved problem. You still can’t one shot a good compiler,<br>despite what Anthropic wants you to believe. Game jams still work, why don’t<br>software jams work?
Even if we solve the “How to make software jams not suck?” huge massive problem.<br>We still have have an auxiliary problem of funding prizes, giving people an<br>actual motivation to participate, compete, and try to win. The typical pipeline<br>of a hackathon is: beg enough local companies until they end up giving you money.<br>I don’t know if that pipeline has changed post vibecoding heat death of the<br>tech industry, because I can’t go that route. For some context I work for a<br>charity Hack Club, which is a “nonprofit movement of teenagers making cool<br>projects.” This makes securing funding for jams easier, you would think. Well<br>it’s complicated.
Hack Club works on an hour based funding scheme. To maximize efficiency in<br>running programs, every Hack Club program gets $8.5 per hour to spend on prizes;<br>buy participants things, encourage them to engineer more. How do you find out<br>how long someone’s spending coding? Well in years past it was a self report,<br>give a ballpark estimate of how long you spent. When more hours means more<br>money you can start to see an incentive to lie about time. Hack Club needed a<br>better solution, that solution at least for coding (hardware is a separate mess<br>of it’s own) was Hackatime. A server for<br>wakatime that tracks how long you’re physically typing<br>on your keyboard, then use that data to determine funding.
So the obvious model of a program run with this funding scheme acts like a hip<br>and cool job. You work for X amount of hours on a project of your choosing, and<br>the charity gives you that value as prizes. Sometimes those prizes are flights<br>and events, which are great but you begin to notice another perverse incentive<br>here. In an ideal world a participant would work on projects they’re interested<br>in, those projects would be projects that improve their skill, and Hack Club is<br>paying you to improve your coding. This dream sometimes is reality, but ugly<br>incentives still rear their head. Why not just grind out lazy project after<br>lazy project, rake in cash, learn nothing, and be happy? Yes you can augment<br>hours with voting on a normal curve, so that on average it’s still $8.5/hr but<br>penalize the lowest half and reward the top half. Again this is another<br>solution that does improve things, but still sucks. You still make money<br>working on lazy project after lazy project, and thus cost Hack Club money<br>they’d rather not spend but can’t justify not giving you.
So what’s the solution? You’ve followed the map to this point, now you are<br>here. I don’t know, but we’re trying to kill two birds with a software jam<br>shaped stone. Here’s how:
If you just want to cut to the chase you can see the website right now,<br>radish.hackclub.com.
Why don’t people submit low effort games to game jams on mass, if it’s bad<br>there’s still clearly a lot of heart and soul that made it there to the end.<br>Why? Because you get nothing for making a bad game jam game. You get bodied in<br>voting and all you are left with is the game, and you don’t like your own work,<br>or you didn’t learn anything from the experience you wasted your time.
So we can use the jam solution to solve the Hack Club problem, but we’ve come<br>full circle. We still have problems however with making software jams not suck.<br>How do we fix that? Pretty easy, get better judges, be very clear with<br>expectations (ie. Here’s some project ideas, notice none of them involve<br>LLMs!), and the most crucial part, give people time to make nice code. Where we<br>once had spaghetti we now have AI slop, no one wants to write either. We<br>Stockholm syndrome ourselves into being okay with our captors with the sweet<br>sweet phrase, “we’ll fix it later.” Write it good enough from the beginning and<br>you’ll have jumpstarted a real project, something to build a success off of.
The last kink, I hand waived the Hack Club model’s connection to game jams, but<br>now I shall explain. To make the hour model work, you need scaling prizes, the<br>more people participate, the bigger the prizes. The only part of this that’s<br>slightly awkward is that you...