On November 4th, 2022, at Hack Night 1.0, we ran the first instance of demos at Hack Night. But by the following week, we had already stopped running them.

On February 16th, 2024, Hack Night 4.0 made a second attempt at Hack Night demos, branding them “midnight demos”. These ran sporadically throughout Spring 2024, but had fizzled out by the end of the semester.

On August 30th, 2024, Hack Night 5.0 introduced “midnight demos, but for real this time”. This kicked off the first long-lasting weekly demo session at Hack Night.

On September 13th, 2024, Hack Night 5.2 ran the first instance of 🏁 Checkpoints, the rebranded version of midnight demos.

Checkpoints have been a resounding success. Right after everyone gathers in the main area for the countdown to 0~0~0, the lights go out, the floor speaker is turned to its maximum volume, and folks line up to share what they’ve built on a giant screen for all of Hack Night to see.

Today, dozens of people share an update at Checkpoints every week, and hundreds of updates have been shared. When I asked community member Ishan what he thought about the first one, he said:

You know the feeling you get when you lost something you had, like you didn’t realize what you had until you lost it? Checkpoints are like that but the opposite: we’ve gained what was missing from Hack Night.

One might expect demos at a hackathon-flavored event like Hack Night to fit in naturally, given that they’re core pieces of traditional hackathons. But it took us 2 years and 3 and a half tries to make them a part of Hack Night. Why was it such a heavy lift? The answer is the story of how we scaled Hack Night beyond our wildest dreams and discovered its purpose.

Attempt 0

The first Hack Night, Hack Night 0.1, ran on September 16th, 2022, in a classroom in Purdue’s Wilmeth Active Learning Center (WALC). Hack Night’s goal was to bring people together on Friday night every week for uninterrupted time to work on personal projects. Hack Night 0.1 was a proof-of-concept: we brought people into a classroom at 7pm, played some music, stuck around until the last person left around 10:30pm, and that was it.

At the time, Purdue Hackers looked quite different from today: our efforts were concentrated on hour-long workshops which ran roughly every two weeks. Hack Night was a bet on a new & unproven idea. It initially received some pushback, particularly around the meeting time—Friday night is typically when people go out with friends, not go to club meetings to code, so there was concern that we were limiting its potential out the gate with a needlessly inconvenient meeting time.

Hack Night made two bets:

Many interesting people actually rarely go out on Friday night and are looking for a social event where they can hang out with other interesting people. Hack Night can become the Friday night social event for them.
Many people want to build personal projects, but academic & social obligations prevent them from finding the time or energy to follow through. Hack Night can become built-in time every week for making things.

These bets, combined with the initially uncertain nature of Hack Night, created a strong “zero obligation” culture. No part of Hack Night, including participating in its events or coming at all, should ever feel required.

Hack Night 0.3 was the initial success case of this model: a group of 20 people came with few expectations and naturally split into groups. One group of 6 got to talking about alternative ways to measure time, and by midnight, had created Lightning Time, which remains a core part of our culture today.

Even so, we felt like the completely unstructured nature of Hack Night was limiting. It was great if you already had an idea, or happened to meet someone you connected with, but it felt intimidating and isolating for everyone else.

Attempt 1

Hack Night 1.0, on November 4th, 2022, attempted to fix this by introducing a strict, hackathon-like schedule—including:

“Sessions”, or workshops which run during Hack Night; Hack Night 1.0 ran two Sessions in the same night
A “30-minute challenge”
A game break
Demos!

Participation was not required for any of these events, but I laser cut a couple collectible “badges”, engraved with the date of the event, to give out to those who chose to demo.

Of all of Hack Night 1.0’s experiments, demos stuck around most in my brain. Giving people an opportunity to share things they had been working on added a lot of energy to the event, compounded by the collectible badge rewards.

But something felt wrong. For one, it was difficult to convince people to share what they were actually working on—most projects shared that night had been made years before and were very polished. It was difficult to imagine what future demo sessions would look like as long as Hack Night only had 20 attendees who we failed to convince to share works in progress.

At the same time, it was clear that the other events we had run at Hack Night 1.0 didn’t work. They required lots of top-down effort to run, and ended up feeling forced and inorganic.

So, the lesson had been learned: strict schedules are for hackathons; Hack Night is for unstructured work time. And by Hack Night 1.1 the following week, we had abandoned the schedule entirely.

Attempt NaN

You may have noticed that Hack Night is “versioned”, loosely following semantic versioning. Every week, the “minor version”—the number to the right of the period—increases. The “major version” to the left increases when something notable about the structure of Hack Night changes. You can think of each “major version” of Hack Night as a distinct era.

Two major versions—Hack Night 2.x and 3.x—came and went before we attempted demos again, during which Hack Night changed tremendously:

Hack Night 2.0 moved the venue to the second floor of the Bechtel Center, Purdue’s makerspace for students, which shifted the vibe massively from the classroom in WALC.
Hack Night 3.0’s most notable change was that our average weekly attendance spiked from 20 to 80.

Soon after Hack Night 1.0, we realized the badges we gave away as incentives to demo could instead be beautiful & high-quality keepsakes—so we began giving them to every Hack Night attendee, and they scaled up to a core part of the Hack Night experience.

Many began making their closest friends at Hack Night & making it their primary weekly hangout spot. Sometime during the 3.x era, we also brought back weekly Sessions, but rebranded them to be facilitated by community members who would share something they learned recently, or test an upcoming workshop.

By Hack Night 3.x, Hack Night had become nearly unrecognizable from the versions 0.x and 1.x Hack Nights of 2022. What began as a gathering of 10 people in a classroom ending before midnight had become an intense 80-person production in a makerspace, with unique collectibles distributed to everybody, at least one sub-event every week, ambitious community projects, and rituals, ending between 5:00 and 9:00am the next morning.

Even so, it took a while to attempt demos again. The failure of Hack Night 1.0’s strict schedule strengthened the “zero-obligation” precedent first set at Hack Night 0.1, and we had learned from that by making sure all of Hack Night’s sub-events were opt-in, never commanding the attention of every attendee. The Bechtel Center’s expansive layout reinforced this by allowing groups to spread far out. We also didn’t know how to solve the problem of potential demoers being intimidated or sharing polished “backlog projects”, and felt like demos were blocking on solving this problem.

Finally, however, we tried again.

Attempt 2: Just try it and see what happens

Hack Night 4.0, on February 16th, 2024, introduced:

Republic of Hackerland Passports
Circles (weekly book club–style gatherings for learning new things)
Midnight demos!

By this point, we had already been running a Session every week in a corner of the venue. Demos would be just like the 10pm Sessions, but at midnight and for anyone to share something they made. Participation was optional and there were no rules around what you could share.

The first instance was of midnight demos started off strong with a packet sniffer written in C. This inspired more people to share, and soon the ball began rolling: 90 minutes later, people were still sharing projects. I was especially excited by the nontechnical projects: to me, this was a sign that we had overcome the barrier of intimidation that typically plagues demo sessions like this, especially since they were intertwined with highly impressive technical projects.

But the cracks began to show immediately: demos did not run again until Hack Night 4.3 on March 22nd, 2024, over a full month after 4.0—and after that, they never ran again.

Part of the problem was that Hack Night 4.x significantly ramped up the number of sub-events that required top-down effort to organize. Before Hack Night 4.0, we only ran one 10pm Session; after 4.0, we needed to facilitate midnight demos, Circles, Sessions, and passport-making ceremonies.

Passport-making ceremonies, in particular, proved to be far more intense than we expected. The first few were over 2 hours of intense work, and often ended after midnight. Even when they ended earlier, we would be too tired to transition immediately into demos. Ultimately, demos failed to become an expectation of Hack Night, and we stopped trying to run them after Hack Night 4.3.

Attempt 3: If you’re going to do it, do it

A few things happened in tandem between Hack Night 4.0 and 5.0 that led to our third attempt at demos.

First, we began to question why we were so afraid of commanding attention for an event. We ran 4.0 demos in the Session corner so as not do disturb anyone who didn’t want to see them—but why? Maybe everyone should see what everyone else is working on. Bechtel Center–era Hack Night was increasingly fragmented, and many had been asking for ways to bring everyone together. Midnight demos, beginning right after the countdown to 0~0~0 which already brings everyone to the front of the space, seemed like a great way to help accomplish that.

Second, an obvious-in-retrospect flaw of 4.0-era demos was that we didn’t enforce a time limit, which led to some demos lasting 10 minutes and the event as a whole lasting up to 90 minutes. This made them needlessly exhausting to run and killed excitement for attendees to participate.

With these in mind, Hack Night 5.0 kicked off the Fall 2024 semester on August 30th, 2024 with new and improved demos. Just after the countdown to 0~0~0, we turned the lights off and invited everyone to share something they built that summer. The only rule: keep it under 2 minutes.

Demos at Hack Night 5.0 were electric. Lots of folks shared super impressive projects, and those demos inspired other demos, including those from first-time attendees and those who shared works in progress. It felt like we had nailed it.

But, again, the cracks had already formed by Hack Night 5.1 the following week. Far fewer people shared an update, and many of those who did were still sharing backlog projects. Many new groups had formed after 5.0, but almost none of them wanted to share what they were actively working on because they were afraid of sharing something incomplete at a hackathon-like “demo” session.

We also desperately needed a speaker setup, since demoers now needed to project their voices much further than at the Session corner.

Despite these flaws, we felt like we had finally gotten something right; it just need a little bit of tweaking.

Attempt 3.5: 🏁 Checkpoints

At Hack Night 5.2, on September 13th, 2024, we changed 3 things about midnight demos:

We rebranded “midnight demos” to 🏁 Checkpoints to communicate its purpose as “checking in” on what you’re working on rather than “demoing” a finished project.
We added a new rule that you can only share something you’ve worked on within the last week.
We bought a microphone and speaker for use during Checkpoints.

We also improved our transition from the count. Starting with Checkpoints, we brought the speaker to the front, turned off the lights the moment it became 0~0~0, and immediately began Checkpoints before anyone had a chance to leave. This cut the previous minute-long setup gap and made it require activation energy to not stay for Checkpoints.

5 months later, these have proven to be the final ingredients necessary for making “demos” work at Hack Night. They can sometimes remain intimidating for beginners—public speaking and sharing your work require some vulnerability that can scare people—but we’ve seen a massive overall increase in people sharing works-in-progress over complete and polished projects.

I think the second change is the most load-bearing of the three. The “backlog projects” shared at Hack Night 5.0 were intimidating for many attendees; by effectively banning them in favor of scrappy works-in-progress, we removed this source of intimidation.

I was also surprised by how much of an effect the simple name change to “Checkpoints” had. The more accessible name changed who shared an update and what they shared. Undemoable projects suddenly become Checkpointable, and as people took notice, Checkpoints began to look very different from Demos despite being structurally the exact same.

2 years and 3.5 attempts

When we explain Hack Night, we like to call it a “mini-hackathon”. This is a good way to get the general vibe across, but Hack Night differs from traditional hackathons in a few key ways. Hack Night is not competitive in nature, has an indeterminate and much shorter length, and is a weekly event rather than a yearly one.

These differences change the purpose of Hack Night significantly compared to a hackathon. At a hackathon, people form teams and compete against each other to build the best project, which they share to judges at the end of the event. At Hack Night, people learn in public with friends and build fun, creatively fulfilling projects together.

The story of Checkpoints’ success is the story of how we finally discovered this purpose. Every attempt is a milestone: Hack Night 1.0 was our attempt to run it like a true “mini-hackathon”; Hack Nights 2.0 and 3.0 were when Hack Night formed a distinct identity and scaled up dramatically; Hack Night 4.0 faced growing pains and apprehension to break previous norms; Hack Night 5.0 and 5.2 are when we finally figured it out.

Today, Hack Night is the strongest it’s ever been: every Friday night, 80 people come to our local makerspace, grab a badge, assemble & stamp their passport, learn a new topic within a domain at the two Circles, share something they’ve learned at the 10pm Session, and share a project they’ve worked on in the past week at Checkpoints. It’s a magical experience that took 2 and a half years to build. If you go to Purdue, you should stop by sometime.