#freedomflag

To be honest, I think the most important part about a hackathon is the idea. Of course, they’d like to see something that works but from what I gather, they like to see something new and different. And honestly, don’t worry about the lack of knowledge in something. You can look up the things you’re going to need the days before, but we mostly did it all looking up tutorials or StackOverflow answers as we needed it.

But some things to consider:

Be realistic: This is important. You’re not going to get a finish product out of a hackathon (you’ll actually be lucky if you can manage to have something that looks finish and actually works). Built the simplest thing you can that provides value or that shows best you idea. In our first hackathon we wanted to do a lot of things, but 12 hours in we realised we weren’t going to have time to finish everything so we focused on something and the rest was just a mock up, only there to show the rest of the functionality.

It’s important to have a multidisciplinary team, seriously, don’t bring only pure programmers… Having a designer in the team really helped us in the last one. Also, bring someone who’s not afraid to talk in public an who can make the product look its best on the presentation.

This seems obvious, buut TAKE BREAKS. Go take a walk, go for a drink, whatever. Just get away from your computer for a bit, burn out is a real thing in hackathons and it happens really easy. Oh, and talk to other teams if you can, get to know new people like you.

Use frameworks. I’ve always been really used to do everything from the scratch, but some frameworks can save you a lot of time. Think about what you want to build and look up frameworks you can used in advanced. You’ll save a lot of time (and it’s usually easier than build anything yourself, so you don’t have to worry about not having a lot of knowledge in that area).

I’d recommend using something like Trello and have a board with everything you need and then sort it in To Do, Doing and Done. It helps to organise the team so no one ends up with nothing to do.

And lastly, the most important part: The Presentation (Pitch). Everything you’ve done in the last hours is going to be shown here. You want it to look good. You want people to get interested in you product, even if it’s not finished. You need to show what your product could do. Have a nice slides and have a powerful speech. Work on it.

Oh, if you’re doing the full hackathon and not going home for the two days, consider bringing/taking:

Comfortable clothes (I usually go for leggings or sweatpants). Also, if you’re doing the presentation, bring nice clothes too.

Toiletries (not brushing your teeth in almost two days feels really gross…)

Snaks: they usually provide enough food (specially if they’re small hackathons), but better be safe than sorry -and shops are closed at 5am.

Naps: when you’ve been coding for 12 hours your brain is slow. Take a nap around the middle of it, even if it’s only a couple of hours. You can even do it in shifts, so there’s always someone working.

Episode 10 is my fave of the season. Just rewatching it brings me so much joy.