26 Feb 2016

I recently participated in the Hack.Summit 2016 48-hour Hackathon and it made me reflect on all the hackathons I have attended. It was the first hackathon I’ve participated in “virtually” and I must say it was a pleasant experience. Unfortunately, my team and I didn’t win the grand prize of $100k, but we surprisingly finished in the top 100 (out of 1261 submissions). Top 8% is not bad if I say so. Our idea was inspired by an actual scenario my daughter experienced and we wanted to explore it a bit more.

The theme for our idea was geared around education and giving back to the community. What we created was a platform Parents could use to help teach their children that giving to a good cause is good and can be rewarding through the use of creative story telling techniques. What we delivered was a very thin slice of the idea that we will try to release and market because we think it could make a difference in the world.

Anyway, this blog is not to promote our idea, it’s really a quick 8-point list (in no particular order) of things to help you survive a 24-48 hour hackathon.

1. Come prepared with a gist of one or more ideas. The hackathon has a set deadline! You want to reduce the amount of time thinking of blue sky ideas
2. Pace yourself. It’s very easy to feel pressured by the deadline of the hackathon. If you sprint to quickly then you’ll run out of gas quickly and be counter-productive. Even worse, you’ll start to consume energy boosters, which will have an impact on your overall stamina.
3. DO NOT try to build everything!! You only want to do enough to prove the concept. Think of the MVP (minimum viable product) and stick to completing that user journey. Complete one thing really well and if you have more time add more. It sounds obvious but its easy to get carried away.
4. Play to your strengths. Don’t get me wrong, Hackathons are a great opportunity to test out new technology, but if the technology is way out of your comfort zone, then you risk not completing your MVP.
5. Divide the responsibility by areas of code. If you are working in a 3-4 person team, last thing you need (especially just before the submission deadline) are merge conflicts! If you can divide the responsibilities in the team to different areas then you are less likely to step on each others toes (i.e. one work on UI, one on API, one on artwork).
6. Avoid drinks / food that are high on the GI Index. This relates to rule 2. Not only is it bad for your health, but it’s going to affect your mood, stamina and cloud your thoughts. The worst thing I ever did at a hackathon was drink 3 beers at 11pm because they were available… you can imagine how productive I was a couple of hours later… zzZZzzZZzzZZzz
7. Create a CI/CD pipeline. I know it’s a hackathon, is this something you really want to spend time doing; well if you anything like me, I like to automate tasks that are repetitive and prone to human error. Even if your process is just a bash script, that’s fine as long as it’s repeatable.
8. Lastly… and by no means least, HAVE FUN! This one is pretty obvious, winning is always great but hackathons are really about unleashing your creative side, exploring new technologies, techniques, collaboration and engagement, so have fun.

Happy Hacking!