DEV Community

Discussion on: 10 Tips to Win your Next Hackathon

Collapse
 
fsonntag profile image
Felix Sonntag • Edited

2 and 3 are very valuable. My friend spent the first 30 hours of a 40 hours hackathon trying to get Angular 2 running (the beta was just released). Well, of course in the end their result was very immature compared to others.
Something similar happened to me in another hackathon, we couldn't get the planned setup working. So we just stopped after three hours and tried a completely different approach...

But I strongly disagree with 1. The point of a hackathon is to do everything within the given timespan, so preparing presentation slides feels like cheating.

Also another neat trick:
Always keep a list of ideas and add new ideas every time you have one. So you can always fall back to that list.

Collapse
 
girlknowstech profile image
Girl Knows Tech

Hi! Glad you agree with 2 and 3, let's talk about 1!

I agree with you. I personally never did prepare anything in advance even if I would want to. My life is so crazy and I am running from one event to another. However, it might depend in the kind of hackathon. I mean yes, people do arrive sometimes with ideas. Of course no coding, but you can't stop your mind from thinking about what you could do, right?

I mostly included that in my post because I know some people don't consider it as cheating. I'm not even sure what my opinion is. I mean... it's not coding. It's just saying who does what. That work could even change when a team arrive at the event if they get influenced by the companies...

I would be very curious to know what is the general opinion about this. How much people agree with dispatching tasks before a hackathon and how much thinks it's cheating?!

I love your list of ideas. Because you're right. I don't know about you, but my and my teams never have any ideas before a hackathon. (That's probably why we never prepare anything anyway!) We just meet companies at the event and often end up doing a project that can fit in their contest so we have more chances to win something. It's another motivation.

Thanks for your comment !

Collapse
 
ankushsaha89 profile image
ankush saha

"but me and my teams never have any ideas before a hackathon"

Same. :)