Hackathon 101

I’m on my way to Surat for InOut, probably the largest student run hackathon in India. I have a 6.35AM flight to catch and I’m currently in the middle of a 5 hour long layover. I’m pretty sure that if I fall asleep I’m going to miss my flight. So I’m going to fill this time with a post on Hackathon 101.

I have participated in a bunch of hackathons during my 4 years of undergrad and I ended up winning most of them too (Not so humble brag, up top!). Here are some of the things that I have learnt or realised in those 4 years.

Technical hacks win

Hackathons are technical. Good technical hacks outshine idea-heavy-execution-poor hacks. In 2012, I had participated in Yahoo HackU! in IIT Delhi along with 3 other folks (one of them is travelling along with me for InOut, Abhay Rana (Nemo)). We had made a WebRTC based Google Hangout alternative, complete with collaborative doc editing and chat. While the idea in itself isn’t something mind blowing, the fact that we managed to pull off a hack on a technology as complex as WebRTC with a working demo was enough to get us to win.

Impressive Tech + Average Idea = Win

Don’t Cheat

Seriously. The major problem with hackathons is that it’s super difficult to ensure that nobody cheats. Now cheating can be of various forms in a hackathon:

• Submitting an idea that you have been working on from before the hackathon
• Submitting someone else’s work as your own hack
• Faking the demo completely

Bill does all of this. Bill is a bad guy. Don’t be like Bill.

These days hackathons have become high stake events. But seriously, cheating just spoils the entire fun of it. Use hackathons as a learning platform and not as a money making one.

Practice your Demo

Your hack is worth nothing if you can’t sell it. That’s just how life is. You could have the best hack in the event but if you can’t get this across to the judges, you are not going to win. I’m pretty sure few of the competitions we won was just because our presentation was perfect. As engineers, it’s tough for us to understand the importance of this, especially with most of us believing in meritocracy, but I just cannot stress enough on how important this is. Here are a few tips:

• Keep it crisp, to the point and inside the time limit.
• Know and explain exactly the pain point that you are solving.
• Explain exactly *how* is your hack solving what you are claiming it solves
• Prepare for counter questions. Most of them should be super obvious to you if you’ve done your research well.
• Present and answer questions with confidence. If you are not confident in your talk, it looks like you are not confident in your hack. That’s not what you want.
• Actually rehearse the demo before giving it.
• Explain clearly the tech involved, especially if the hack is tech heavy. Judges should understand that it wasn’t a straightforward hack.
• Don’t bullshit.

Apart from the selling aspects, also keep in mind Murphy’s Law. Everything that can go wrong will probably go wrong during the demo. Prepare accordingly.

Networking

You are going to take breaks. You can’t just work on your hack every single minute. Take this time to network with others in the event. Talk to the judges, the sponsor delegates, your fellow participants and even the organisers. You never know what may come out of it. You might get an idea for the next hackathon you participate in. Or maybe you impress a judge enough to get to interview at their company.

Most sponsors treat hackathons as a bed for recruitment. Use this platform wisely and you could be interviewing with some of the companies that have sponsored it.