I Signed Up for a Company Hackathon

There was an announcement on Slack letting people know about the upcoming hackathon. I read it once, added my name to the signup page, and went back to whatever I was working on. I didn't think about it.

I remembered it yesterday morning, when another Slack message went out about the last day to register. Our manager mentioned it in standup too.

This is a newsletter called Building My Way Out. The title is not subtle. Every Friday for the last six weeks I've written about why I'm trying to build something outside of a full-time engineering job. I've written about the economics of leaving, about the app I started in September and shipped a few weeks ago, and about the four technology shifts I've watched remake my career.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I signed up for a company hackathon.

The contradiction isn't lost on me. What bothers me is that I did it without noticing. I didn't weigh it against anything. I didn't ask whether it served what I'm trying to build. I saw it, clicked, moved on. The instinct was automatic.

I've been doing some version of this my whole career. A project announcement lands in my inbox and I want in. A new framework comes out and I want to try it. Someone posts about a new AI model and I want to build something with it by the weekend. I've shipped more half-started things than finished ones. The constant, as I wrote in February, is the writing. Everything else has been a sequence of pickups and puts-downs.

The hackathon fits the pattern. So does something else I caught myself doing last week. A job listing for a staff engineer role at an AI company crossed my feed, and for about an afternoon I ran the calculation. I have the years. I have the track record. I could probably put together a credible application. And I'm writing a newsletter about building my way out of exactly this kind of job. But my ego still ran the calculation.

Why? I don't fully know. I've been trying to figure it out this week and I keep circling the same few possibilities.

One is that picking up new things is cheap. It costs a click, a registration, a couple of hours. It feels like progress. Focus costs more, because focus means committing, and committing means you have to be willing to watch the thing you committed to either work or not.

Another is that I've spent decades building a career where picking things up was rewarded. I got hired, promoted, respected, partly because I was the person who would take on the new thing, or the most legacy thing too. That's not a pattern I unlearn in six essays.

A third is that spreading yourself across many things protects you. PuraLetra is live. This newsletter is public, with a small and slowly growing subscriber list. Both of them can fall on their face in a way that a half-started side project never could. A hackathon is safe by comparison. You show up, you build something over a few days, nobody expects it to become a business or anything bigger.

I don't know which of these is closest to the truth. Maybe all of them. Maybe none.

I'm not going to drop out of the hackathon. I said yes, and backing out now would be its own small act of dishonesty. I'll show up, I'll build something, I'll probably enjoy it. The truth is I already have half the project done, and I'm excited about where it's going. There I go again.

But the essays and PuraLetra are the things that matter. Everything I do that isn't one of those two things, or the job that pays for both of them, is gravity pulling me back toward the default shape of my career. I'd like to be the kind of person who notices, next time, before signing up for the next thing.

Tags: Building My Way Out, Philosophy