📌 What are Hackathons?
Hackathons are an awesome way to bring your community together to learn new skills. Build amazing projects and share ideas.
A hackathon is best described as an "Invention marathon". It is also known as hack-day or hack-festival. the hackathon was derived from the OSS (Open Source Software)
📌 Who can attend hackathons?
Anyone who has a love for technology and wants to gain experience in building projects. Those who want to make awesome connections can attend hackathons. For attending hackathons you don't need to be a programmer or majoring in computer science.
📌 Impacts of hackathons
- Hackathon helps in solving problems
- Hackathons beings the like-minded people together who solve real-world problems.
- Hackathons are inclusive
- Hackathons is for a large diversity of people
- Anyone with any background can be a part of the hackathon.
- Hackathon creates interpersonal impact
- Hackathons embraces the opportunity for both introverts and extroverts
- Hackathon helps to educate people
- You can add great projects to your portfolio
- You can learn from others as well as teach others.
- In the end, you become a better version of yourself.
- Hackathon helps create valuable networks
- You meet mentors
- You can meet great hackers
- You can meet sponsor representatives and can get information about the companies sponsoring it.
- Hackathons helps to create opportunities
- You can show this in your CV.
- You can directly contact the representatives of companies sponsoring this.
- Hackathons help to create a Community.
- I create a hackers community
📌 What is Hacker Community?
Hacker community is a group of like-minded people having some interest in attending hackathons and solving shared problems of our society.
📌 How can you become a hacker?
A hacker community has people from different backgrounds, different knowledge, different experiences. People from all skills and all levels can become/are part of the hacker community. Your skills and level are not the criteria to join. They will eventually grow by being in the hacker community.
📌 Benefits of attending hackathons?
- You make amazing friends. Some of them can become your lifelong friends.
- You can share your ideas, knowledge with them and learn a lot from them as well.
- Helps you to collaborate with other hackers on a real-world problem statement.
- You can celebrate and have fun and enjoy your presence.
- You also get to contribute to Open Source.
- And ofcourse awesome swags (T-shirt, stickers, bags, props, etc) and free food.
📌 Points to focus on during Hackathons.
🚩 Idea :
- Idea can be considered as a problem you need to solve
- You can find an idea (problem) by looking in your surrounding. there are many problems in society that can become a potential idea. (ex: finding the lost key, finding spectacles, finding the specific thing in the house, week algorithm of a traffic signal, etc.)
- To get a broad perspective on your idea/problem brainstorm with your hacker community or any other community.
- Talk with your friends and family about it.
🚩 Teamwork :
- Teamwork plays a major role after selecting the problem to work on and the idea behind it.
- At this point make sure every member has his expertise. Make sure you utilize the fullest of their tech stack.
- Divide the work amongst the team members according to their skills and interest.
- Communicate actively. Keep asking questions on issues you face, Keep backing your team as you need the active support of your team.
- If a person in your team does not know about anything make sure he is able to understand. Teach him/her about it.
- with great teamwork, you can learn, teach and win at the same time as you are not competing with each other.
🚩 Execute :
- Map the time and set goals and milestones accordingly.
- Try achieving these milestones in the allotted time period.
- This will help in keeping track of the project and will ensure that your project goes on the right track.
- Buffer-Time: Always keep the buffer time. In case you messed up with something there is always the buffer time to lower down your stress.
- Plan B: This is very important to be ready with. Whenever you are working on any problem statement make sure 1 or 2 members are working on plan b. Plan B can be another approach to the same problem statement or any other problem statement. While the other members are working on Plan A and it fails or has issues then the team has a backdoor to quit Plan A and force the execution of Plan B.
- Buffer time and Plan B helps in reducing stress during the hackathons and a sense of healthy development is maintained
🚩 Pitching:
- Pitching can be done in many ways.
- Face to face
- Zoom meetings
- First submission and then reviewing.
- While pitching face to face or in zoom calls make sure you show the demo working of the project than showing the ppt. Remember your work speaks more than your ppt.
- While in the First submission and then reviewing you should submit the demo video with the source code the required file. This will help you because the judges won't set up and run your project.
- Stick with your project. Be on point with the description.
- Keep the judging criteria in your mind and make sure your pitch answers all of them.
- While picking mention USP (Unique selling proposition) tell how it will help others and what impact will it create.
- Also describe all the difficulties you faced and everything you did to overcome them. And most important what did you learn.
- Structure your pitch in such a way that the listener should have 3 things in mind at the end.
- Problem you are solving.
- Solution you have come up with.
- Impact it is creating in society.
- At the end "Give your best and leave the rest"
📌 How to get involved in Hackathon?
There are many roles to get involved in hackathons.
- Become a hacker
- Organizing Team Member
- Hackathon Mentor
- Workshop/Talk Speaker
- Organizer (Gives the experience all the above roles)
Top comments (7)
Sure, I would love that!
Yes, I wholly agree with hackathons - I think it's a great way to challenge yourself, learn new things, meet new people, and be immersed in a network than the one you're currently in without the stress of academic-based projects or learning. Great place to be inspired and get creative. Mentorship and leadership opportunities can also be found! 💡
Very true.
Do you know about any upcoming hackathons?
You can always see upcoming hackathons on Angel Hack, MLH, Devpost and Devfolio sites!