TLDR
Have fun, meet interesting people, learn something new, share your knowledge and you’re very unlikely to go wrong at hackathons or at life.
Hack-a-what?
Hackathons are usually 24-48 software making competitions where people come together to build interesting projects, pitch to judges and win prizes. They’re called hackathons because you’re hacking things together and are a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes there’s free food, free drinks, free merchandise but the best hackathons don’t need many material items to make it great and below are a few things we suggest to make the most of these amazing opportunities that world needs more of.
Why should you listen to us?
We're a team of veteran hackathoners who have attended more hackathons than can count and have overall won, placed or won sponsored bounties at many of them. We have also helped organise hackathons and sponsor them so we understand the logistics on the other side of hackathons too.
Have fun
Life’s too short to take it too seriously so find joy in the little things. Whether it’s a sunset or sunrise over the venue, the art work on the walls or the great and simple interactions with other attendees embrace them as it is usually the feelings that last rather than specific details of an event.
Meet interesting people
It can be easy to stay in your bubble and build something. You can code and submit a project by yourself but it is infinitely more fun to work together with friends whether you’ve known them for a while or met them at the event. The best teams usually have a good coder, a good designer and a good business person and it’s diversity that makes it great. Meet all kinds of attendees; organisers, sponsors, builders and more. The organisers as they can help you with event specific queries, the sponsors as they are experts in their field and can help with most queries, other builders as they may have solved problems you’re seeing for the first time and we also include people like caterers, cleaners and security as their insights can also make your project better.
Learn something new
There’s a saying that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something however there is a great talk explains that you should aim for 20 hours to start become competent at a new skill. Hackathons are the perfect opportunity to dedicate a portion of your time to pick up a new skill or learn a new tool that you’ve been looking to learn for a while but never had the time as the time constrained environment forces you to focus on a small subset of items that are actually feasible in the allotted time.
Share your knowledge
Take time to share your knowledge or skill in a topic either from before the event or during it. It’s important to guide people across paths that you’ve been through because it prevents needless suffering to help avoid the pitfalls that you’ve gone through but also because it’s hard to say you actually fully understand a topic if you’re unable to explain it to someone who doesn’t know it.
Embrace the chaos
Things will always go wrong at hackathons. Team members can leave last minute, your code base no longer works and you can’t find out why or the WiFi goes down or your laptop crashes mid demo. Being adaptable and open to working around problems to find solutions is key to be resilient and to get something out of the short time you have there.
Submit something and build something useful
It’s very easy to get disheartened when building at a hackathon. You may feel like quitting as omeone is building a project that seems more interesting than yours, the tech stack you’ve tried is not working or someone asks a question that fundamentally challenges your feelings of the utility of your project or you see people are using tech that is currently out of your reach (whether in cost or skill). You never know what people will find worthy of a prize if you self-select out by not submitting. But also build something useful as, even if you don’t win a prize, you will have solved a problem for yourself - if not many other people who are having the same issues as you.
Be kind
It’s very easy to get angry at yourself or others when things go wrong but having empathy and patience usually helps you see that some things are not worth stressing needlessly over. You never know what people are going through and a kind word or gesture can completely change a bad event to a good one. Be a good team member too by ensuring everyone actually eats, takes breaks, has time to speak to other attendees and share the load of any tasks.
Take care of yourself and others
Given that there is a lot of time available and it’s very exciting, it can be very easy to get swept up in what you’re doing and not eat, drink or sleep. In general you will perform better if you take regular breaks, are well rested, have a full stomach and are well hydrated.
Which crab will you be?
There’s a story about a group of crabs stuck in a bucket, at some point one will be able to reach the top and two things can happen. The other crabs can start pulling the one at the top down back into the bucket, or the crab at the top pulls the other crabs up and out of the bucket. You’ll see both kinds of crabs at hackathons and in life but you can choose which crab you’ll be.
Always remember to say good morning to the people you care about, eat good food, face the ghosts you fear head on and to never quit.
This post was written at the Encode AI London Hackathon for the Superteam UK Bounty prize.
