10 Reasons to Attend a Hackathon
I’ve attended almost 15 hackathons, enjoyed maybe 2 of them (one of them was this past weekend) and found some time to debrief my experience. Enjoy!
Reason 1: Learn Commercial Technologies
The more technologies you’re familiar with, the more problems you can solve because you’re more aware of the tools at your disposal. Think of it like you’re constructing a tool box of skills to help you approach problems and find better solutions. This weekend, my team and I hacked a solution consisting of Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Chrome APIs, Amazon AWS Servers, jQuery, and Ajax. I’ve never used half those technologies before but thankfully, there’s always some good documentation out there.
Reason 2: Build Debugging Resiliency
Sheryl Sandberg once said that resilience can be trained like a muscle. Debugging code is just an aspect of that resilience and I strongly believe the more time you spend fixing nasty bugs, the more immunity you build up against nastier bugs. Hackathons are especially difficult because the goal isn’t necessarily to write production ready code. What you do write resembles a frankenstein-esque amalgamation of languages and APIs. Since you can’t rely on that perfect implementation, you’re forced to test your code often. This is an extra bonus for building debugging resiliency.
Reason 3: Learn From Others
Two brains are always better than one, and six brains are usually better than two. Hackathons are an excellent opportunity to work on a group project and ask industry mentors for help. You will never be on your own in a dark room with just StackOverflow for company, there are real people who are there to help you become a better engineer. I was incredibly fortunate to have a team consisting of UX enthusiasts, AI goddesses, politically passionate people, and critical thinkers and I can definitively say that I learned something new.
Reason 4: Get a Taste of Industry
Software engineers are constantly utilizing new APIs and working on large code bases, it’s helpful if you know how to read other people’s code! To my friends who are already in industry, hackathons are also a great opportunity to learn APIs from different divisions within your company (and other companies). More importantly, industry is all about building on fundamental concepts. For instance, the Naïve Bayes classifier we initially wrote for our project expanded on a spam filter classifier we wrote in class; we even attempted to create test and training data for our model.
Reason 5: Discover Strengths and Improve on Weaknesses
Now you’ll finally be able to answer that one question all interviewers ask. Seriously, it’s hard to be amazing at everything in CS, you’ll have to find one or two things that interest you and slowly explore them. It’s better to master a few skills than it is to be average at many skills. I realize, after nearly two years of attending hackathons, that I really prefer working with back end technologies but hackathons are also a great time for me to improve my UX Design skills.
Reason 6: Pitch Your Ideas
Hackathons are a wonderful opportunity to hone your presentation skills. That said, pitching is a very difficult skill to acquire. In addition to being succinct and convincing, you may also have to field technical and non-technical questions and even attempt to envision the future of your product as a potential business venture. However, extensive practice and exemplary pitching role models do help a ton when it comes to improving your presentation style.
Reason 7: Cultivate a Culture of Curiosity
Hacking is more than just sitting in a room for 24 hours straight. You’re going to be tearing things apart and hastily putting them back together, it’s an active cycle of breaking things, fixing things, and breaking them again, just to fix them a few moments later. That process is incomplete without asking questions. This past weekend I asked myself (and others) a plethora of questions (How does an AWS server work? How can I connect Javascript and Python? How do you link from a Chrome extension? How do I scrape a website?). Asking and answering these questions reinforces your curiosity and directly influences the number of side projects you complete.
Reason 8: Build Projects that Matter to You
Hacking is a process of unearthing relevant problems and finding solutions to them. The ideation process every team goes through at the beginning of the evening is a great opportunity to discover what matters to you and which problems you want to solve in the world. Hackathon tip: keep all the ideas you come up with as you brainstorm, even if you discarded most of them; they’re great to reference when you’re thinking about your next project.
Reason 9: Hone Your Persuasion Skills
Computer science and business are closely intertwined. If you plan on entering industry, academia, or anything in between, it’ll be incredibly helpful if you can convince someone else that your product works. Last weekend’s ideation process took nearly 5 hours, not because we didn’t have ideas, but because we waited until all the six members on our team were convinced that our idea was worth it. The cycle of refining ideas and persuading others isn’t bad at all, it weeds out conflicts much earlier in the game.
Reason 10: Become a Better Engineer
It’s true. Side projects make you a better engineer. And the best part? Side projects are for everyone! If you’re passionate about anything (which I hope you are), then you’ve got the ability to realize those passions through a physical product. The practice of ideation, breaking down the project, learning new technologies and putting them all back together is a fundamental part of being an engineer. The better you get at that process, the more questions you ask and the swifter you improve your skills. It just builds on itself. And ultimately, you can take ownership for a piece of software (or hardware) that you put into the world.
Ultimately, hackathons are meant to be fun! Yes, it’s stressful, tiring, frustrating and rewarding all at the same time, but I promise, everything works out in the end.
Last thing, if you’re interested in looking at what my team and I built this past weekend check out this link: https://github.com/kmandyam/NWHacks2017 . Hint hint: it’s a chrome extension that reveals information about your political echo-chamber and whether you’re exposed to more conservative or liberal, credible or non-credible, sources on a regular basis.
Happy Hacking!
