Four Lessons From My First Hackathon Experience

Over the last weekend I participated at my first Hackathon ever - an online Hackathon for women (https://thehackathoncompany.com/herhackathon/). With this opportunity I'd like to share my four lessons learned from this experience.

Before diving right into the lessons learned, let's look at some basic questions beforehand.

Am I ready for a hackathon? How can I contribute meaningfully?

Did I feel ready? No, I was not sure what to expect of a Hackathon. Are my skills suitable for participating and adding value to my team? Can I actually contribute meaningfully to the challenge? I honestly had no idea, I just had a wish to learn and see what is possible to build with a team in a very limited time frame. In the end I learned a lot even in very unexpected ways.

Lesson 1: Try to be close to your team mates

My hackathon participation was also an experiment in terms of (a)synronous work environment. I happened to be travelling and in a completely different time zone than my team mates (I was basically 6 hours ahead than my team mates) and that made it more difficult for me to engage with the rest of the team. While I was awake and at my peak production time, everybody else was not. We didn't use a project management tool, making it even more difficult to pick up tasks, when nobody was online.

For the next hackathon I would try to be physically near to my team mates and even meet offline, if possible even before the hackathon starts.

Lessons 2: Don't overdiscuss features but think of the business case

Everybody has their own ideas of features, of what would be cool to have/ to implement, but I would recommend taking a step back and thinking more in depth of the business case. Don't spend too much time coming up with many features, have a clear pain point, solution delivered by your app and start hacking!

Lesson 3: Build that MINIMAL viable product

Closely related to Lesson #2 - once you have decided upon your solution, just build it as a MINIMAL viable product. Don't start implementing things that you won't need for a demo, like a login screen. That's maybe one of the least important things and concentrate on implementing what you intend to show as a demo.

Lesson 4: Learn more frontend, use the tools available

This is a personal lesson that applies to my situation, as my main programming experience is based on the usage of Java, a backend programming language. I believe, in order to convince a jury (in which maybe not everybody is knowledgable about programming) you will need to showcase your demo in a pleasant and inspirying way. My skills on the frontend side are still improvable - that is one more reason for me to continue learning CSS frameworks, JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks. It was inspirying to see how slick and amazing the different solutions were. Most used tool for mock-ups and demos was Figma, which I discovered for myself with this opportunity. I will definitely look more into this great tool.

Thanks to the organisers, companies and all amazing women involved!