What happens at a hackathon?

What happens at a hackathon?

I went to a Hackathon once (won too), essentially when you arrive, they lead you into a large room with a cluster of PC's or laptops, you can bring your own computer too.

I saw one dude come in with a full gaming rig with two monitors and everything…

But yeah… you’ll have some experienced software developers introduce you to the competition and then present a few programming problems/projects to work on for the next 24 or 48 hours.

Once the introductions are over, the clock starts ticking and everyone’s begins to code!

Well actually you don’t start coding straight away, firstly you need to get into a team and start brainstorming ideas to solve a chosen problem, when you’ve made a plan, start researching ways to solve that problem, what languages will you use? what libraries will you need? etc…

It’s important that you don’t spend too long planning as you won’t have enough time to code your solution!

When it comes to coding, these will be the most stressful hours of your day, you’ll run into all sorts of bugs that will hold you back. The most important thing is to manage your team suitably so that everyone is working on a different task and you’re all not held back by the same problem.

Once the time is up, you must submit your solution regardless if it’s finished or not.

Also, did I forget to mention, you have to present your solution to everyone as well!

If it turns out that your solution stands out the most then you win!

For mine, we built a discord chatbot that could perform chat-moderation tasks as well as other things.