Sampson

Hackathons are getting weird, but maybe good weird? I've been judging hackathons for years. A few years ago, they typically consisted of software engineers using Vim or VS Code, staying up all night, hammering out fragile demos in teams of two or three. Then, a couple years ago, I started seeing more well-rested folks with ChatGPT open in a browser tab, copying and pasting code into their editors. More people were working alone, too. And not everyone was a developer; several were simply technical. Yesterday, I judged a hackathon here in San Francisco where the demographics, stack, and process had shifted even more dramatically. I'm seeing older participants, more non-developers, more one-person teams, and folks who need help understanding project-submission questions like, "Describe your stack." A first for me, though, was the emergence of the one-shot fabler. I was chatting with a participant who hadn't even started her project yet. There were only a few hours left before the deadline, so I mentioned the time. She wasn't concerned. She planned to spend a little longer refining the prompt, then "one-shot fable it." Models have gotten good enough that people can now spend substantially more time on the idea itself, with remarkably little concern about whether they'll be able to turn it into something polished before the deadline. And the projects are more polished. But they're also becoming strangely similar, since so many people are building with the same models and the same defaults. It's starting to feel a little like judging mobile websites during the heyday of jQuery Mobile: wildly more accessible, impressively polished, and somehow everything has the same fingerprints.

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Orange juice is meant to be chewed. Gimme that high pulp—nothing less. Also, SF is not so bad at 5AM (just look before you step) 😬

Body says “sleep”. Schedule says “sleep”. But the mind screams “get up. build!”

One interesting thing about this early-morning lifestyle: eventually you don’t even need the alarm. Let’s get after it!

Early to bed, early to rise. Getting your warmup and workout started before 4am is epic.

I had planned to sleep-in, and kick the day off at 4:30am; it looks like I’ll be getting a head-start! 😊

Here we go—let’s get it done!

Looks like we’re kicking things off a little earlier than usual today. I should rejoice; I’m always asking for an extra hour in the day 😂 Let’s make the most of it!

“Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled.” Psalm 6:2 Sometimes we wake up because we have a schedule to keep. Other times we wake up because the body hurts too much to lay any longer. Today is the latter. Either way, I’m thankful for the day.

Psalm 3:5 — “I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.”

Easy days make you soft. May they be few and far between.

They need you. Show up. Work hard. Lead.

What a blessing it is to be exhausted as a result of having the life you prayed for. Get up and be grateful—not everybody is so fortunate.

Sometimes all you get are 4 hours of sleep. So be it. The world is full of well-rested failures; I won’t be one of them. Get up. Get to work. Be the exception.

Choose the difficult path. Get accustomed to hard work and delayed gratification. That’s where growth happens.

It’s Friday—finish strong.

Proverbs 6:10-11, “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber…” Get up. Kill that weak voice which begs you to slumber.

Success is slow, and hard. Quitting won’t make it fast or easy. Get up. Do the work. Go!