10 tips for winning a Remote Hackathon

Co-authors: Rishika Jassal and Akanksha Singh

Hackathons are where your crazy ideas become reality!

We had our first remote hackathon at SAFE Security and we are excited to share that our team “Compatible in Bits” emerged as the winning team out of the participating teams.

The theme of the hackathon was — Securing Cloud

Here are some of the learnings and winning tips that can help you in winning your next remote hackathon-

• Communicate well-
  The major challenge in a remote hackathon is good communication among team members.
  To solve this, we created a Google Meet link on which all the team members were always online irrespective of whether there is communication or not.
• Prepare the presentation well-
  All work will go in vain if it is not presented properly. Try to follow the keep it simple approach in PPT.
  Certain things we kept in mind were:
  a) Keep minimal context switches between the presenters
  b) Try to put factual data
  c) Use images to make it more appealing
• Brainstorm on your idea well-
  A novel idea which when solved creates value. Once you have finalized your idea, make sure you take inputs on your idea from your mentors who will shape the idea very well.
  We discussed our idea with multiple SMEs to find loopholes in our idea and bridge them before the hackathon.
• Rehearse with the team multiple times-
  Make sure you rehearse your presentation and demo multiple times with your team members to avoid the break of flow during the final presentation.
• Take breaks-
  Take short breaks and have fun to avoid burnout in the 50 hours. During the course of the hackathon, we had certain informal sessions that worked as stress busters.
• BFS over DFS-
  Try Breadth first approach over Depth-first approach, i.e. explore the idea along the horizontal lines rather than the vertical.

DFS(left) vs BFS(right)

• Mitigate the risk beforehand-
  Figure out the unknowns and complexities if the theme is known from before to avoid last-minute failures.
• Adapt quickly-
  While implementation, there can be certain challenges, don’t hesitate to mold the idea when required. Within such a short duration, one should be quick to switch to alternatives and workarounds.
• A working MVP is important!
  Try to build a team with people having expertise in different areas required for the idea. This will help you to implement the idea end to end.

Credits: Brainy Quote

• Time Management is important-
  During the final presentation, try to put across your idea within the specified time limit. Often a penalty in the score is added for exceeding the time limit.

To conclude, we would like to say —

Credits: imgflip.com

Hope you find this article useful