Tears at a Hackathon

My last hackathon was defined by a high school student leaving the event in tears after his team kicked him out for not knowing how to code. What came next reaffirmed my passionate belief in hackathons, the country I grew up in, and human beings in general.

I love hackathons. If you're not familiar with them, I'd encourage you to forget the "hackathon" word and instead imagine 1-2 days working with strangers in what I believe to be the world's most perfect working environment. You don't need to know how to code, or talk in front of big rooms, or anything else. You have to care about solving a problem. I want you to envision a building full of passionate people from wildly divergent backgrounds who shed their ranks and titles at the door and organically form their own little special operations teams. These teams are magical because they coalesce not around any commonality between the members, but around shared passion for a problem. In fact, a team's strength is generally defined by how little its individual members have in common. The result is an electrically charged situation with just the right combination of pressure, humility, and exploration.

If you've never been to one, you should go.

I attended my first hackathon as a volunteer helping to plan it. I had just made the transition from flying special operations missions in the Air Force to attending grad school at a prestigious but highly inertia-bound school. I suddenly found decades of red tape between me and the impact I wanted to make and I was perilously close to dropping out in frustration. What I discovered at the hackathon was that this little 3-day event attracted all of the free thinking and courageous people I couldn't otherwise find. It was as if the idea of giving away 36 hours of your time to work on a problem that you might never solve was a beacon that attracted all of the people I am most energized by. I was instantly hooked.

Now, I go to hackathons to meet "my people". I do so because there is simply no other way to detect them as quickly or as surely. They don't have a secret handshake, a way of dressing, a skin tone, a gender, or a sexual orientation that makes them stand out from others. Their boundaries know no age limits, nationalities, or single languages. You could sit in the cubicle across from them for a decade and miss this most important element of their nature. Theirs is a "tribe" based on ideas and optimism. It is an opt-in family that has no use for the walls that others tend to build around the demographics and geography over which people have no choice.

As often happens, the most important elements of this were brought into focus for me by the occurrence of something truly terrible at the last hackathon I helped out with. In the middle of the first day, I was pulled aside by a panicked organizer who had seen a high school student get kicked off of a team and leave the building trying to cover up tears. No one had been able to stop him and he was around around the corner and half a block away before I could catch up with him.

In trying to slow him down and start a conversation while he tried to hide the tears on his face, I recognized what he was going through. The intensity and hurt and shame radiated off of this young man in a way that reminded me of the how I often felt when I was growing up. I started to have visions of the way my Mom would talk to me when I was in the middle of an elementary school meltdown. Decades later, I still see that stabilizing emotional heft in the way she whispers to a rescued horse at the end of her little barn in Maine. I was impressed by how much more calm and reasonable he was relative to how I would have been.

While I was telling him stories and talking him back into the building, I couldn't help reflecting on how much more courageous he was than I had been at his age. I well remember the sometimes embarrassing side effects of having the kind of passion it takes to project one's self into an environment in which everyone else seems more trained and better qualified. The emotional fuel that makes that kind of courage possible comes with the distinct possibility of unwanted eye leakage in some conditions, which can be irrationally and excruciatingly embarrassing. (A good litmus test for this condition: watch the Ruth Bader Ginsberg movie "On The Basis of Sex"...if your eyes don't well up at some point, you're far more emotionally disciplined than I am). Watching this guy have the courage to walk back into a building that had seen him cry was awe inspiring to me.

It turned out that this young man and I had a lot in common, though he had chosen a path of intrepid action far earlier than I did. He was a high school student with almost no formal training in computer science, but a burning desire to be able to code. English was his second language and he didn't know a single other person at the event. He was one of two high school students participating in a crowd of more than 100. He had applied to participate in this event that was put on by an Ivy League institution knowing that he was likely to be among the least trained and technically skilled people there....and yet he persisted.

I remember being in a similar boat, but having a lot more advantages. While I did grow up on a dirt road in Maine, I looked like and spoke like everyone else. While I was the last kid in my kindergarten class to figure out how to tie my shoes, I had teachers and family constantly present to cheer me on and pick me back up. When I decided I had to be a military pilot at the age of eight, despite being afraid of elevators, escalators, highways, bridges, and (significantly) airplanes...nobody doubted my dream or kicked me off a team. If a defeat resulted in my melting down in tearful self doubt (as was not entirely uncommon), you can bet that nobody would be seeing my face for a while no matter what anybody said.

The young man I was talking to launched out of his comfort zone on his own with no social safety net there to catch him. When an Ivy League-er's selfishness resulted in his ejection from a team, he had the courage to come back to an event where everyone had witnessed his worst nightmare coming true in a very public way. He was strong and resilient enough to talk with me for an hour and, while I couldn't talk him into joining another team, he made good on his promise to come back the next day for the final pitches.

If I have ever possessed the fortitude this young man showed, it was not in me before years of flying combat missions a half a planet away.

The most meaningful moment of the weekend for me was giving him a t-shirt I had made before the event to try to drive home what I believe to be the core ethos of hackathons:

Go where you don't 'belong'

No one else so perfectly embodied the courage it takes to break out of one's silo and engage with a problem without giving in to the fear of judgement or rejection. Seeing him immediately change into that shirt and take pride in it forced me to hide a bit of eye-welling myself.

If there is one thing that is best about America, it is the prevalence of opportunities for people to go where they don't 'belong', to break down silos, and to crack calcified stereotypes. This capacity for dynamism and diversification has seen us through some of the darkest moments in human history. The presence of this young man proved to me that we still have those capacities.

Despite the limits of gender roles and race relations that defined his time, Theodore Roosevelt encapsulated the emotional strength it takes to maintain that dynamism and diversity in a speech he gave over 100 years ago. Roosevelt had grown up in a way that both this courageous high school student and I could identify with...bed-ridden with chronic asthma and unable to engage in the acts of adventure and heroism that occupied his every waking thought. He learned to see past his current limitations and believe in a life that he would come to define for himself through sheer force of will. He distilled this spirit into a single speech that, to me, encapsulates the greatness of the young man I met at this hackathon and the nation that made our meeting possible:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt, 23 April 1910

We should all come to know both victory and defeat. We should seek out environments in which diversity is valued as fuel. We should surround ourselves with people whose courageous different-ness breaks down old fashioned calculations of what a winning team "should look like". We should all be led by folks like this young man who cried at a hackathon...and came right back.