What you should know about hackathons, before starting?
Hackathons are one of the best ways to test your skills, not only in programming but in other domains too. A hackathon is a lifestyle in itself.
I got into this activity as a teenager because one of my best friends did it. I didn’t participate in many hackathons, no more than 10 in the last year. Still, as a person who likes to question everything, I observed some mistakes I made at the last hackathons.
What is a hackathon, you may ask?
A hackathon is a 24- to 48-hour contest, where you meet other people and create a team, or you come with your team, and under the offered time you design a new product based on a given topic. These events are created at the request of companies that need new ideas for a specific topic or just by organizations to attract people in this domain.
Below, I will highlight the main mistakes I and my teammates made.
First, at most hackathons, we are given a topic or a problem, but most of the time this problem is described generally, and many times we searched what to do based on the given topic instead of picking a specific niche that had a serious problem in that topic.
What do I mean by that? Well, at the last hackathon, we were given the “Tourism” topic, and for the non-tech companies, one of the given problems was “promote eco-tourism” or something like that.
The problem was that me and my team focused so much on the given problem described in the document, that we forgot to solve a real-life problem. We focused so much on promoting eco-tourism, that we forgot to find a problem and solve it. I realized after the hackathon that with our solution, we didn’t solve any real-life problems.
As I saw, many of the people there didn’t solve any problems; they just took the given topic and made a solution, that may or may not be used.
The second mistake I made, as someone who is very competitive and aggressive at hackathons and sometimes at work generally, was that after a few hackathons, I really should have created my team.
I was in a team with two girls last weekend, one of them was the first time at a hackathon, and the second seemed too theoretical. I don’t like very theoretic people, and I was just debating continuously with her and she didn’t like it very much.
Thus, this was not the first time I didn’t like my team at a hackathon. Two months ago, in May 2024, I went into another hackathon, my teammates weren’t so accustomed to the hackathon vibe, and it was the first time I observed that I needed a team.
A third mistake, I observed at hackathons, and not only in me but in my teammates too, is that they don’t know what a hackathon is. Faced with the fact that a hackathon isn’t just generating ideas; it’s working and not sleeping, it’s programming.
People can’t adapt. A hackathon is a good way to see if you like the startup life. The one when you work 24/7 to create your product. The hackathon can be the start of this life.
As an example, I had a hackathon in May where we generated the idea of YouthHub. I won’t describe what this idea is, but now I’m working at this alone (currently searching for a team), and I really think that this idea has great potential.
Many of the ideas generated at hackathons have great potential if the teams that created them would implement those ideas, but many of the ideas are forgotten, and that’s bad.
This is the experience I gained as a teenager in hackathons in the past years. If you liked my article, don't forget to follow my blog.
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