Attending Florida’s First Gender-Inclusive Hackathon
Although Dainyl had participated in a hackathon before, they were looking for a hackathon that was more gender-inclusive. Thankfully, they stumbled upon Florida’s first gender-inclusive hackathon: TechTogether Miami!
Read below an in-depth article of Dainyl’s experience.
To the public, software developers are often stereotyped as introverted and crass; men who only care about code. To the media, tech giants such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are all they see. At TechTogether Miami however, the complete opposite can be found — a diverse group of some of the kindest, most passionate tech nerds I have had the pleasure of meeting.
What exactly is TechTogether Miami?
On Friday, February 18th, I had the pleasure of attending my second ever hackathon (a multi-day long event where developers create applications from scratch) and Florida’s first gender-focused hackathon, TechTogether Miami! The goal of TechTogether is to redefine the hacker stereotype and increase representation of women and non-binary people in tech. This hackathon was a weekend-long event filled with workshops for participants and non-participants yearning to expand their technical knowledge in a multitude of fields. This includes web development, mobile development, and even game development; we also learned how to pitch our projects, negotiate job offers, and more!
How does TechTogether stand out?
As alluded to earlier, TechTogether is the largest initiative aimed at decreasing the gender disparity in the software development and tech field. Not only that, but TechTogether pushes for attendees from all backgrounds and skill levels — especially early developers! As of their 2020–2021 report, 98% of hackathon attendees would recommend attending a TechTogether event.
There were an outstanding number of workshops at TechTogether Miami which were suitable for entry level developers — but more experienced developers could learn a thing or two as well! While I did not attend the Web Development track of workshops, I attended workshops in the App Development and Game Development track and learned a lot of things. As soon as I have the time to dedicate to it, I’m very interested in learning Kotlin and looking at the Unity engine.
Building a team project
At my first hackathon, I built a relatively simple project on my own to see if I could withstand 10–12 hours of coding. If you’re having fun with your project, then I found it was actually quite easy! However, I decided that I would prefer to split up the work rather than tackle the entire project lifecycle on my own and ended up teaming up with a UI designer. The team formation process was quite simple — introduce yourself in the team formation channel and reach out to other developers!
Not only will working as a team save you time, but you’ll also be able to make friends and connections with others like yourself. Working in a group also provides a somewhat different dynamic — if you have designers and developers, then you’ll have to work together and plan a schedule for the next few days as opposed to working at your own pace.
However, this gives developers extra time to develop their infrastructure while the designers can plan out the look and feel of the project. Additionally, this gives you a chance to work as a team (which you can talk about at your next interview)!
Advice for attending a hackathon:
While I would consider the hackathon an overall success, there were definitely things I could improve on during the development process. I usually take hackathons as a learning experience by picking up a new technology such as a database or coding language. Unfortunately, piling on a new coding language to an entirely new database while utilizing a new feature of your tech stack takes a lot of effort! While I was able to get the entire application to match the wireframes (mostly), some routing errors prevented full functionality of the website (you can check it out here!).
As a general piece of advice, I would highly recommend using hackathons to expand your knowledge. However, possibly limit it to a smaller goal — try a new API, database, or feature one at a time. Additionally, make sure that your team is okay with that! Some teams will take hackathons at a more relaxed pace, while others will try to aim for the top spot.
Final takeaways and what’s next:
Overall, I would highly recommend attending a TechTogether hackathon if you can! It’s a wonderful, diverse, and welcoming experience where you can connect with those like you — which can possibly be hard to find in the tech field. Similarly, I’ll be attending TechTogether Chicago on February 25th; if you’re going to attend as well then don’t be a stranger and feel free to say hello!
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