Thoughts From A Hackathon Failure

Disqualification’s never felt so good.

Ten minutes to go till the deadline and the app we’d spent a weekend creating wasn't actually live. At this point I should probably have been feeling pretty down at what on paper was certain failure, however this wasn't the case. This was my first hackathon and throughout the weekend I’d tried out a host of new things that I’d never attempted before and getting some of them up and running had left me elated.

Going forward there are a few things I’d take away from the experience:

1. Have a clear idea of what you’re building. The team had been formed a couple of weeks prior and so we had time to think through what we were going to make. However throughout the weekend the idea evolved yet never quite formed into something concrete, this was mainly because we were happy just to be building something in a team and getting new features to work was satisfying enough. To succeed in hackathon however, having a clear idea and message that you can get through to the judges is critical.
2. Communication is key. This is something I believed we did quite well as a team. Rails Rumble is unusual in that it is a distributed hackathon and therefore we used a couple of methods to stay in touch. We kept the main conversation in HipChat making sure we stayed in regular contact so as to keep up to date on each other’s progress and ask advice if we had issues. Any meetings which required more elaborate discussions took place over Google Hangouts.
3. Watch out for restrictive rules. This third point is the reason we weren't able to qualify. The rules stated we had to deploy to Linode and our only experience of this kind was with Heroku. One member our team tried valiantly all weekend to set it up, but unfortunately time got the better of us.

Throughout the weekend I was part of a group put together by the team behind One Month Rails, this is an online course that I can’t recommend highly enough for anyone who wants to get a start in web development.

Diving in to something new isn't always easy, but it’s very often worth it. I intend to take part in many more hackathons and hopefully take away something new from each one, maybe I’ll see you there.