How to get started at hackathons
Disclaimer: Part of this was presented during #Hackamon2018 as a 2 part tech talk
When I first started doing Hackathons, it was back in early-2017 and ironically, it was Hackamon. We pitched an app about improving space and facilities use within the University, even though we had some up and downs, we couldn’t build a proper app (because I didn’t really know ReactJS back then).
After properly learning ReactJS, I also approached GovHack 2017, and the Digital Workspaces Hack 2017 with this knowledge, from this I realised that the demo app/minimal viable app was not only the important app, pitching is also really important, from this I will look at how we can improve.
Pitching to Your Audience
At first, I didn’t realise that pitching is one of the key parts of the Hackathon. But as I began to go more and more hacks, I slowly realised that even though our products that we built was better, but the pitch wasn’t necessarily as strong as some of the teams who won. So dedicating time to design a pitch. Usually before you figure out your pitch your need to think about the following:
- What is the problem we are trying to solve? And how does our solution fix the problem? — This is really important, because if you don’t know what problem you are trying to solve, it doesn’t really matter.
- Who are our intended users, audience? And what benefits does it bring? (if you are targeting uni students for example, you will need to think about, the benefits to both the students and the university in general)
- How scalable is our solution? Can we get it out to 10 people? 100 people? How about 100,000 people?
Then after your pitch is ready, be sure to grab a mentor, and do a practice pitch with them! That’s one of the reasons that they are here at a Hackathon, They will hear your pitch and maybe provide some constructive criticism.
Also something that you should do is complete market research, many people take this lightly. I found that it is much easier to convince someone that your solution is good or the problem is good when you have data to convince your stakeholders, pitch judges or even your friends to join the ride.
Bringing out some of the cool tech
So, I love coding 👨💻and I love working in teams 👪
But what if there was a way that I good remember how the code looked liked throughout its stage, for example if something went wrong and I want to go back to a previous version?
Eric Jiang
Hackamon Track 1 Tech Talk
Building a technical solution in a big team in a hack may be difficult but we can always make it easier. Even though everyone may be coding quickly, not necessarily making good code, we can always protect the code with Versioning Control
GitFlow allows for:
- clearer separation of code (especially if you are working in a team)
- branching off branches and we can merge it in.
Sometimes we don’t necessarily have the skills to build an app, we can always build some wireframes
…to show off how it would look like too. It may not be a fully working app, but nobody knows that 😉.
Some of the Wireframing/Mockup tools that I like include:
- Sketch
- Adobe Experience Design (XD)
- Figma
- Invision
- LucidChart
- Heck, you can even use MSPaint, Photoshop or the good old trust pen and paper
But If you really want to you can build it out….
Something that I really like when building something like a web application is look at: ReactJS + Firebase. You can check out my talk about this here. It allows you to build something fast without a proper ‘backend’ and ‘frontend’ system.
Just remember, when you are participating in a hack. You do not need to worry how the app’s architecture looks like. You’ll just waste your time on something that you probably spend a little amount of time showing during your pitch.
And that’s all folks!
If you have any thing else you believe that you would benefit others in #Hackathons. Don’t forget to comment below. Also please give some ❤️ and 👏 to this article.
Hi there, I’m Eric Jiang and I’m a Project Lead at Monash University. I’m currently leading a project called monPlan which is a course planning tool that I started off initially as an Open Source Project. I am very passionate about Innovation, especially Student Innovation. And I often given tech talks 🎤at various events and also mentor at hackathons! All my views are my own.
