Want to hear an unpopular opinion in the developer world that might garner a similar reaction to saying pineapple belongs on pizza? Try saying, “I hate hackathons” in a room full of programmers.

Hackathons are a key part of a developer’s career journey. But while the social events are commonly thought to boost company culture and foster collaboration, some programmers think the popular events have room for improvement.

Bad blood. IT Brew caught up with several hackathon alums to discuss their feelings toward the coding events. Mira Welner, a bioinformatics engineer, told IT Brew that at one point in her life, all of the socks in her closet were swag received during her participation in hackathon events. However, despite her active history with the social coding events, her feelings toward them were less than stellar, partly because she believes they “glorified bad coding standards.”

“It’s not possible to do something better in 24 hours than what you could do giving a week’s worth of work to it,” Welner said.

Welner also added that at times, hackathons feel like a way for some companies to squeeze out “extra work” from employees under the guise of a fun company event. She recalled one time where a hackathon at a former employer required a team to convert a script from Java to Pearl as a project.

Read the rest here.—BM

The end of campaign season offers a chance to reflect what went right and wrong—whether you’re a candidate or a nonprofit trying to protect them.

Michael Kaiser, CEO and president of Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC), a nonpartisan org providing free or discounted cybersecurity services to political campaigns, is using the election “off season” to consider the threats fielded by 2024 political teams.

While some Americans feared deepfakes’s deep electoral impact, many cyber incidents that emerged, Kaiser said, were of the “classic” variety—familiar threats like denial-of-service attempts, account compromises, and phishing.

“Compromise a third party that is trusted by the campaign, then use their compromised email to send an email to the campaign that then compromises the campaign, right? You can’t get much more classic than that,” Kaiser said.

Read more here.—BH

AI-friendly innovations are coming soon to a data center near you.

From new wooden construction models to out-of-this-world locations, data centers worldwide are no stranger to innovation. However, while a number of these changes have been spurred by sustainability goals, some cloud computing experts say a new motivator will begin to factor into the design of these facilities: AI.

What’s ahead? IT Brew spoke with several cloud computing experts to discuss what types of changes are in store for data centers across the country as AI becomes more mainstream. Nathan Blom, co-CEO at Iceotope Technologies, told IT Brew that for many up-and-coming AI data centers, density will be a key differentiator from traditional data centers as new locations look to “maximize” their footprint.

“The more you can pack into each rack, and the more racks you can pack into each row, the more efficient you become,” Blom said.

Andrew A. Chien, William Eckhardt professor in computer science at the University of Chicago, told IT Brew that the need for denser data centers will also bring on changes to the physical build of the infrastructures.

Keep reading here.—BM

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