What I learned from my first hackathon

This guest post was written by Clancy Schuller, a participant at the 2017 Tanda Hackathon.

This year was my first Hackathon and really my first interaction with coding, webhooks and APIs for that matter. I didn’t have much of any idea of what I wanted to work on for the weekend, let alone how to execute it. Not knowing too much about coding or how approach a technical idea, I was initially hesitant to put myself out there and go around and see what other people were working on. I definitely eased into it a bit more after pitches and seeing how idea that may seem really basic actually requires a lot of work to run properly.

Working with Zappier and Twilio on our no code project on the Saturday morning, I thought I’d already learnt so many new things especially in terms of approaching and implementing ideas and the importance of rejigging things to try and decrease computational time or reduce steps. However by the time presentations rolled around my mind was well and truly blown. I thought I was sold on no code but boy was I wrong. Sure I was still impressed with what we had constructed through sites like Zappier but it was absolutely incredible to be able to see the back end and see what each line of code actually contributes to the final product. It was a really awesome weekend, with some amazing people and I’ll definitely be back next year — hopefully with some programming skills ;)