Get ready for your next hackathon in 14 days (or just make projects)

“You don’t have to be the best, you just have to be dangerous. You have to learn just enough to be dangerous to build an idea, concept it, and show it to the world.

And then it turns out there are lots of other people, including all 170 employees that work at Instagram, who are much better at doing all that stuff than I am.” — Kevin Systrom Instagram Co-Founder

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Context 🤝

Your friend just called you to join him in a hackathon or you have always wanted you to turn your cool idea into the projects but don’t have a tech stack in mind. Don’t worry, I got you covered, bruh.

Let me give you a bit of background. I am a CSE grad in final year. When I joined college, I had a fair idea of HTML, CSS, JS, and a bit of game development. But didn’t know what frameworks and libraries to learn, so I went on my journey to explore different tech stacks to learn in order to start implementing the ideas I have in my head. Last year I mentored a community of 4000+ students as a teaching assistant of a MERN stack course.

Roadmap 📃

You might be in the same position as I was or you might not even know anything and that’s why you need to follow this guide. (Don’t worry, this is a trial and tested method with my friends as guinea pigs XD)

I chose web dev as it is the easiest to learn with least hassle and time. You can keep track of progress using this doc. Just go to ‘File’ and click on ‘Make a copy’.

Suggested Resources 🔗

Day 1–9 : W3S, MDN, React (English), React (Hindi)

Day 11–13 : Hindi Video, English Video, MongoDB Docs

Day 14 : Choose a project from this channel which is doable in 1-2 days

Handy tips ✅

1. Use the progress tracker provided above.
2. While learning a topic, think of where and how you can use it.
3. You might feel the urge to start working on an idea that came to your mind but just jot it down for now and implement after completion.
4. Develop the habit of reading docs.
5. When creating the project, keep the folder structure, naming convention, and code blocks easy to understand even if you visit it after months.

I think it’s okay to build some clones at the start BUT you should add some features to those website and also change stuff to your liking. Remember, you will always learn more by building projects rather than watching “lessons” on a topic.

Stay tuned for more such content, and make sure to tell me what you want next :)