The trouble is, many hackathons these days aren’t “programming tournaments.” They are advertising for a company/group or a way for that company/group to solicit new business ideas.

This goes double for the blockchain space where everything is about appearances and hype.

So as others have said, I don’t think you should be upset about the “politics” of the winners, but rather about the actual purpose of the “hackathon.”

Yeah I tried to run my own a few times in a few different ways. It was easy to set up and great when it worked but I kept fucking things up every few months and spending a long time fixing it each time. Eventually I just moved to a hosted provider and not only is life so much easier, it’s also much cheaper cause I’m not running my own RDS or Managed Postgres instance for the database like I was in AWS and DO.