A couple of days ago a post titled hackathons are bad for you started making the rounds. Here’s a standard recipe for a Hackathon. Gather a bunch of developers in a location. Supply them copious amounts of junk food, booze and caffeine. Tell them to get cracking for 24hrs. As a generalization that is somewhat accurate...but I’ve been a regular fixture at hackathons for several years now, and I’ve learned one very important thing: hackathons are what you make of them. Sleep There is an almost masochistic take on sleep deprivation in the developer community. (It might be true with other professions, but let’s focus on the devs.) It certainly isn’t specific to developers and it tends to be more of a cultural thing. Pinning this on hackathons is a bit unfair when you see the large percentage of Americans in general that suffer from sleep deprivation. Hackathons have time limits because they want everyone to have the same constraints, not because they don’t want you to slee...