POV: attending your first hackathon with 0 coding experience

Let’s Git it.

This past weekend I attended my first ever hackathon as a non-CS, code-illiterate marketing grad student who previously studied physiology. No, this is not an output of a random persona generator. This is a testament to how welcoming of a space nwPlus has created for beginner hackers at their annual event, HackCamp 2023.

My pre-requisites (or lack thereof)

Till recently, I barely knew what a hackathon was in practical terms. My only similar experience was through a few Adobe Creative Jams I did during the pandemic in 2020. Incentivized by the free annual subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud for all project submissions, I said yes and the rest is history.

With over three years since that first design jam, a degree under my belt, and two gap years filled with work and time abroad, I began student life once more this fall. As a newly initiated campus ambassador for nwPlus, I returned to my old campus with fresh eyes for a memorable weekend of learning, hacking, and meeting new friends.

If you are considering your first hackathon or even just remotely curious about the tech industry, I’m here to give you a recap (and reassurance) of what to expect. If I, the greatest imposter of all, managed to survive, you’ll do just fine.

Learn Day at HackCamp

HackCamp began with a nine-hour day of an opening ceremony, group formation activity, and a range of workshops from setting up your Github repository to a crash course on Figma.

As a pretty intense introvert, the prospect of group formation was the most daunting. But fear not, nwPlus has your back. There’s no icebreaker quite like being forced to awkwardly shuffle towards people wearing the same coloured shirt as you. I chose a terrible day to wear a colour other than grey, white, or black. Giving up about a minute in, I walked up to a girl whose beige sweater seemed “close enough” for me.

After some more mingling, I ended up forming a team with Kathleen, the first girl I spoke to, and one of her classmates Matt. In an odd turn of events, we realized we were all born in the same year.

My team realizing we were all born in the same year

The workshops I was looking forward to the most came at the end of the day: Intro to Web Development and React. I tried to keep up with the workshop, but with the combination of my lack of prior coding experience and the sheer volume of content being covered in 80 minutes, it felt like I was trying to drink out of a fire hydrant. One minute I was learning about basic HTML tags and the next thing I knew, the instructor had already made a fully functional, interactive website.

Illustration depicting my Web Development and React workshop experiences

I walked out of Learn Day hungry and dazed, but feeling inspired to get better at web development the next chance I got.

Tips for Learn Day

1. Bring some food! There’s no dedicated lunch break so it’s more convenient if you already have some snacks you can quickly eat between the workshops. I made a quick Subway run (not sponsored).
2. Team formation on Learn Day > Build Day. Due to time constraints on Build Day, it is better to have a team formed by the end of the first day so you can start aligning on a project idea and figuring out what everyone’s expectations for the hackathon are. For me, it was nice to have friends to sit with throughout the workshops that I could ask for help when I got stuck on some code, since both of them had a CS background.

Build Day

The big day finally arrived: Build Day! After battling my own bladder to arrive on campus unscathed at 7:30am for opening ceremonies (I live pretty far from UBC) and meeting up with my teammates, the hacking began.

We spent the first hour researching and finalizing what we falsely presumed to be an original idea, only to later find out about five other groups who also apparently thought the same.

Nevertheless, we lived in ignorant bliss for most of the hacking period. I got started on sketching out task flows, verifying development feasibility with Kathleen and Matt, then designing the prototype on Figma. It was everyone’s first hackathon so expectations weren’t very high.

I can’t comment much about the specific development hurdles, but there was a point in the mid-afternoon where my teammates weren’t sure that we would have anything ready to demo and submit. I could only helplessly watch from the sidelines while continuing to trudge along with the designs, unable to offer any insights.

My two teammates carried the project.

Luckily, HackCamp had awesome mentors who you could request on a dedicated Discord channel. They helped us overcome the roadblocks and things started to look up.

The final 90 minutes of the hackathon went by in a blur as I started putting together the presentation slides and my teammates finished the last touches on the code. We quickly relocated to a quieter room to film our demos, preparing our submissions on Devpost and Portal for the 7:30pm deadline.

We celebrated the project submission with pizza then moved to IKB for peer judging and closing ceremonies. Just like that, our 14 hour day and my first ever hackathon was now officially in the books.

Here’s a low quality gif of the prototype I made on Figma

Takeaways from my first hackathon

1. Stay open-minded. This applies to finding your team, deciding on a project, and the overall outcomes of the hackathon. I think the more flexible you can be about your expectations, the more fun you will have.
2. Use your mentors! HackCamp is a great place to get 1:1 learning support and the mentors were a super helpful resource to get unstuck, especially with the time crunch.
3. Having some coding knowledge as a designer makes a big difference. While I don’t consider myself anything close to a designer, that was my role by default and I found myself wishing I knew more about front-end development so that I could better support my team and be involved in the process of translating my designs into the final deliverable. I’ll definitely go back to the recorded workshops and slides from Learn Day to refresh what I covered this weekend.

Prior to this hackathon, the notion of coding felt like a black box I was too intimidated to breach. However, thanks to Learn Day and watching my amazing teammates at work (shoutout to Kathleen and Matt), I feel more prepared to approach some beginner coding in my free time.

Thank you to nwPlus for organizing HackCamp and giving me such a positive first hackathon experience! 🫶