Hack the Hackathon

Motivation #

In January of 2021, Jacob¹ and I stumbled into our first hackathon (UofTHacks) together with nothing but the clothes on our backs 🙈. There, we met Christine and Rachel, and went on to win awards at 4 major MLH hackathons². In light of our journey in the 2022 MLH circuit, I wanted to share three tips for successful hackathon project 🥳.

Three tips #

1. Find your squad 😎

If you are going solo, then skip to point 2 ✌️. Most hackathons allow you to choose teammates before the hackathon starts. It’s okay if you don’t know anyone, but make sure you find a team within the first few hours. Complementary skills matter more than mutual interests. Your job in the next day or so will be to build, so make sure you find people who can execute on that in ways you cannot.³

2. Stand your pitch 🎤

I always recommend starting with the problem statement and what you’re going to pitch. There’s two parts to a convincing problem:

First, it needs to be true 🔍. This is easy - it can be based on real-life experiences or you can do some research and find evidence to support your claims.

Second, it needs to be important or interesting 👀. Your project could be solving societal problems with altruistic narratives, like Glean 🌿, or it could be leveraging technology in fun and new ways, like aftr mrkt 👟.

3. Build for a demo 🧑‍💻

If you have a focused pitch, the rest is easy! Ok maybe not, but the point here is to only build things you can demo to others. Most demos are capped at 1~2 minutes, so don’t build features that no one will see. Don’t get too caught up in processes and technical details, because you can build first and refine later 🛠️.

Parting thoughts #

I actually don’t care much about winning ⁴, but there will be times when you feel like you got robbed at hackathons. I can assure you that you can easily bounce back from it (we did it four times!), and it will help you come up with better hacks. It’s also important to lose gracefully and hack with integrity, as the hackathon world is a small place with big ideas. But as they say, the real prize is always the friends we made along the way 😏.

Discussions welcomed on Github.

Acknowledgements #

Thank you to my teammates Jacob, Christine, and Rachel - it’s rewarding enough to build cool things with cool people, but I’m most grateful for their lasting support and friendship 😸👊.

Notes #