Good Hackathon Techniques

• Break the work into as many small pieces as possible and let one person handle each unique piece
• Think super small microservices with a gateway to connect them all
• Mock everything first and set it up for real afterwards
• Have a CI/CD plan set up ahead of time so that builds and deploys to smoothly. <3 Docker
• Bring people with the following skillsets
  • UI / UX Frontend Developer (This person is almost always required and will have constant work the whole hackathon)
  • Mobile Developer (May or may not be the same as the UI / UX Developer)
  • Backend Developer (It is frequently useful to run your own api for data collation or processing)
  • Machine Learning / AI / NLP (These skills help elevate a project to the next level)
  • Integrations guy (Integrations with Slack, Alexa, Google Home, ect are low effort high reward if you know how to do them)
• Sleep at least 3-5 hours each night. It's worth the lost time in increased productivity
• If you can take a break to go get food. Like the sleep, an hour break for dinner to get away is worth it
• Define your idea before starting to code
• Start by laying out the demo and work backwards from the demo to the code
• Write the minimum required code
• Take time to do a stand up every 1 or two hours to make sure all developers are aligned on priorities
• Spend at least 3 hours laying out the demo and practicing the presentation
• Work toward the judging criteria keeping in mind the judges biases
• Rotate the QA role periodically so that everyone can see how the app is coming together
• Set up starter code before the hackathon so that you have examples to pull from when spinning things up quickly