I love hackathons, they are just crazy sometimes. I have attended at several hackathons with a team, and we lost sometimes, won or took prized place. So, I have diverse experience, but what is more important - I have been judging and mentoring hackathons too. That's why I want to give some hints on how to perform better.
What's the point of hackathons?
Firstly, hackathon is an event where teams try to solve a problem and show a prototype in just a couple of days. That's an event when you sleep less than you use to.
There are no doubts that hackathons are extremely useful when you are starting your career. But hackathons really are more than that. Here are couple of points:
- Train your ability to be tough and work hard
- Create new and great connections with other teams
- Have some fun with teammates and technologies
- Check how good you are in your field
- Learn new stuff very fast
- Get familiar with other solutions of the problem you've solved
- Win some goodies
Tips
Now let's discuss what should you do to get a better result and maybe even win. I have collected 10 tips:
- Start working even before the hackathon begins. And I mean, start thinking of the solution you are going to use. Create different paths, generate ideas and prepare the plan.
- Collect a perfect team for the task. If you need to develop an ML system and deploy it - you need both ML engineers and full stacks (at least). And every person should know what he is doing, you don't want to create a bottleneck.
- Choose a project which would be exiting for you and your team. You really want to be interested in the projects to get your best results.
- At the beginning of the hackathon, try to understand the task as clear as possible. That's a critical thing, because that you are going to base your solution on that understanding. I saw a lot of cases when the team didn't really get the task, or they forgot about some important part, which was critical for the business meaning of the task.
- If you can communicate with a mentor - present him your understanding and your plan, Be precise with what you are trying to achieve, so mentor can confirm that everything is fine.
- Try asking a mentor for a killer feature. Sometimes you might get some interesting idea which will help you to make a better solution.
- Work as hard as possible, do your best, don't spare yourself, you only need to work that hard for a day or two. After the finish, you are going to be happy that you did everything you could. Remember that every single, even tiny step can make you ahead of your opponents.
- Make sure to implement all needed features given by the instructions. Sometimes it's enough to show a solid but minimalistic solution. But it's a great idea to try and come up with some new feature which is going to be useful in that specific project. Think about the task as a business problem and try to add more value. Also try to think creative, because companies often organize hackathons if they need new and creative solutions.
- Create a short but great presentation. If you have a working solution - show it - that's always the best thing. Speaking about presentation. You should sound well, have a good image and talk involved. Remember, that on hackathons often is not enough time to create a full solution, that's why presentation is important.
- Finally, talk about things you would do if you had more time. Show how your solution can be scaled and implemented in real business cases. Let judges know that you are ready to continue with the project if hackathon organization is interested in that.
Conclusion
To sum up, hackathons are a great place to test out your skills, learn new stuff, communicate with other specialists and widen your network. But don't forget to have some fun. You don't need to win every hackathon, so let yourself sometimes just to have fun.
Highly recommend trying out yourself at the hackathon, that's a great experience!
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