I am an outsider, but I've seen the inside of this machine.
I came to Ann Arbor from LA in 2009 in order to build stuff in a hacker-friendly and foodie town that is a financially rational place to live.
But I didn't expect to find this community of startupy freaks at UM. They are gung-ho in a lets-go-to-the-football-game sort of way. They are often innocent to technological limits, and at times godawfully ruthless. I also notice a particular affinity for building things quickly and then moving on. But they are doing amazing work at MPowered and have roped in a lot of people who would have otherwise marched into corporate oblivion.
UMich hackathon culture is what germinated my current startup, rapt.fm, in January, 2012. A lot of folks involved in MPowered helped the demo get built on that weekend and put in a lot of hours throughout the buildup since then, (including David, the writer of the article).
As great as it is for Michigan, I do think that most of these folks will head out to the Bay Area. But enough will stick around here where the woods run deep and the people are happy.
My initial instinct was to criticize this. I think that's some combination of feeling like hackathons are often a coarse method of exploitation and the feeling that this kind of boosterism may be overstated or unnecessary.
But the truth of the matter IMO is that this deserved to be recognized and celebrated. It's really exciting to see environments that expose people to the joy of making things and the realities of making things happen. This kind of culture was foreign at the major liberal arts universities I saw when I was an undergrad 5-10 years ago, and I think it's a positive change. Congrats!
There's a big difference between corporate hackathons and collegiate hackathons, I think. The former are exploitative and weird; the latter are inspiring and awesome.
I 100% agree. Bringing someone who has never built something to their first hackathon completely introduces them to a whole new world of possibilities.
I'll throw in my experience. I went to PennApps Jan 2013 after I learned some HTML, CSS, and javascript with some new friends I made. While we didn't associate with Michigan Hackers, we saw the rise of the facebook group, and their "recruiting efforts". They killed it. Fun stuff on the diag(the quad), awesome hack nights. It was sort of a focal point - a bright light to hacker moths, who were always around, but didn't have a community. Mhacks is definitely a force to be reckoned with, and a large part of my first steps towards software development.
Also, MPowered is our university entrepreneurship club. In my experience with them, it is mostly filled with business people trying to find software guys to build their stuff for them. However, apparently there is an incubator that has most of the people that actually build, but I never saw them too much.
Go Blue! Can't wait to see what they will do next year.
I think this post serves as a wonderful blueprint as to how one can create a passionate community of individuals with a single goal in mind.
I would love to see another post, detailing the other side of UM's success; the long hours students spent training, and preparing for a hackathon. Everyone loves to make the claim that they showed up at a hackathon, learned how to program some new language, and take top 3 at a hackathon. What many posts fail to address are what was done to rally the students around such causes and get them both mentally and technically prepared for a hackathon.
Great job David et al, can't wait to see what's next!
Given most of the post is about the quantity of Michigan students at hackathons or other events, I think it's worthwhile to mention how the school is also unique because it has the advantage of size: there are just so many students there.
I find Penn's breakout achievements far more impressive given their much smaller student body, as well as what Columbia/NYU have done with hackNY.
There are many state schools as large as Michigan, such as Penn State, Ohio State, University of Illinois. Illinois in particular actually has a larger CS department but their hackers don't come anywhere close to the turnout Michigan gets. None of the other large schools do. That being said, this shows how impressive of a feat this is for Penn and other small private schools.
There's no place to hack like Michigan. Can't wait to see what happens when people start realizing they can hack anything. Not just photo apps, but civilization itself.
It is a bit of an overstatement to say Ann Arbor's hacker community has been dormant. It's the liveliest in the state and Ann Arbor has also long been the startup capital though it is starting to be challenged by Detroit.
However I was there opening night at MHacks and what that crew pulled off was nothing short of amazing. There was incredible energy in the building that night.
I came to Ann Arbor from LA in 2009 in order to build stuff in a hacker-friendly and foodie town that is a financially rational place to live.
But I didn't expect to find this community of startupy freaks at UM. They are gung-ho in a lets-go-to-the-football-game sort of way. They are often innocent to technological limits, and at times godawfully ruthless. I also notice a particular affinity for building things quickly and then moving on. But they are doing amazing work at MPowered and have roped in a lot of people who would have otherwise marched into corporate oblivion.
UMich hackathon culture is what germinated my current startup, rapt.fm, in January, 2012. A lot of folks involved in MPowered helped the demo get built on that weekend and put in a lot of hours throughout the buildup since then, (including David, the writer of the article).
As great as it is for Michigan, I do think that most of these folks will head out to the Bay Area. But enough will stick around here where the woods run deep and the people are happy.