How to win a hackathon 🔥

between PC and self-interior. I can't wait to hear about that. Okay, now that was a great intro. I don't know how to follow that. But hi, I'm Colleen, and yeah, I am pretty into hackathons. I actually owe my career to hackathons in a huge part because, and this is a no joke, I got my first tech job because of a hackathon project. I was so into hackathons that there was a period of time where I did one hackathon every weekend for about three months. And I don't know if my sleep schedule has ever recovered from that. But it was a blast. And since then, I've been on every side of the hackathon. I've judged, I've organized. I participate a little less now because I do enjoy sleep. But I just cannot... I don't think it is possible for me to overstate just how much I love and appreciate and have a little bit of FOMO for hackathons. So true, I love that one intro. Francesco, I think everyone knows who Francesco is, but Francesco is here. Please give yourself an intro. It's great to have a space again at the, yes, hi, Francesco. I'm currently just a content creator and public speaker, not working currently in the braille. And I've been involved in an hackathon for a while, living before joining the social media, I would say, so mostly in my university. I organized three for hackathons. And this year has been a judge for AWS in Berlin, for a very big hackathon, the old Soku Nalder. And I think it's a great way to get some friends and maybe get a nice price, but I think mostly for friends, I would say. And yeah, so we can share about our experience. And I know Akaton is also, it's an experience. It's a competition, it's an experience. And many people who did the hackathon, they remember that experience. They remember what they got from it. So we'll try to help as much as possible. I think hackathons has changed since AI, but we'll discuss this, for example, the before and after AI for hackathons. And yes, let's scratch it. I love it, that's awesome. Right, everyone's moved positions on my screen, but I think next on my screen is Amanda. Amanda, we have geeked out a lot, and with a lot of stuff together, and I'm so glad we're doing another space together. So over to you. Me too, Eddie, I was so happy when you reached out and I was like, oh my God, I am actually around awake and able to join this space because it has been such a long time since I've gotten to hang out on a space or chat with Eddie and hear Eddie's voice. It's usually just discord DMs. So my relationship to hackathons, I hopefully will have kind of a different perspective to help folks with is I, most of my experience with hackathons is from working for companies and not only filtering through all of the requests I get for a company to support a hackathon and kind of what makes a company want to sponsor your hackathon, but then also from running them and just kind of like being in the community and seeing people build, I'm a huge fan of them, not only for companies, just for people getting together and actually building. And it's definitely changed since AI, how we run them, how we plan them, like Francesco said, but I still think there's a lot of value and a lot of fun in getting together and building with your peers. Absolutely, I mean, so many good points that you raised already. I can't wait to dive into that because you're right, it's a collaboration, there's just so much to it. I think it's amazing. Oh, all the, all the, oh my God, Eddie. Eddie, I didn't even actually introduce myself. I just got right into the topic because I'm so excited about it. I'm a, I'm a man, if you've never had it before, developer advocate worked at a bunch of different companies over the last six years or so, was it before that? And yeah, I just love being in the community so clearly just wanted to dive right on in. Oh wait, I realized I just did that too. I forgot to actually introduce myself. Colleen, go ahead. To introduce yourself into a world to be excited about this topic. But go ahead. I'm a dev advocate at GitLab. And before that, I did, I ran dev advocacy at Particle and worked before that competitive coding, crowdsource consulting at Topcoder and I like Kakathon's clearly. This is gonna be a fun one. This is gonna be fun, definitely, for the afternoon. Right, everyone shuffled around again. I think next on my screen now is Adithia. Adithia last time I saw you was in Japan and it's great to decat with you again online. So over to you. As I said to Andrew, Eddie, it's been way too long. Although I do believe we met a few months later in London as well, just around the Alconvert, but it's definitely been a while. Hi everyone, good to be here. We have definitely got some wonderful company up here in this speaker. So I'm just excited to be a participant of this space as much as to be able to share some of my experiences. I currently lead DevRel at AppRite and it's funny that this space is happening now because we're actually a day away from concluding a hackathon that we're running right now. Always, always love the timing. But hackathons have been a big part of my career. I started hacking back whenever still in school and honestly, I learned to build through hackathons. My first apps, my first APIs, first time I tried a cloud platform. They were all at different hackathons. And I think by now I've had the fortune of experiencing hackathons from all possible sides of that table, whether that's as a participant, as a winner, as a mentor, organizer, both independently, as well as now for a company having sponsored a few as well. So I'm really excited to be a part of this conversation today. I love that. Thank you so much for joining us. And if you've got a hackathon on at the moment of the year, I've just put in the thread, the PayPal Dev hackathon, but also add yours as well. And everyone listening, we're bringing you all up on some of the up-and-stays in the second half, but do put questions in the space thread as well and we'll be checking this out. Okay, there's been a shuffle around on my screen again. So, oh, shuffle and again, right. Where's everybody gone? Okay. Cloudy, over to you. Cloudy, we've geeked out in London a lot and it's always great to be caught with you. So I'll pass the mic over to you. Please give yourself an intro and all the awesome stuff that you're doing. Awesome. Thank you so much, Eddie. I hope you guys can hear me okay. Happy Friday. Thank you so much for having me here. Claudia Senior Community Specialist at Zapier. My background, I actually feel a little imposter syndrome because I'm surrounded by so many talented people working in DevRel. I'm just a humble community manager. My background is in fact building and growing communities particularly around no code, automation and AI. At Zapier, I work with our community of builders, operators and partners. So I host a ton of build-alongs in person and online virtually at Zapier. So similar to what a hackathon is, I guess more guided. Before prior to tech, I used to be a primary school teaching assistant. So I guess a build-along is more kind of suited to my teaching style. But I'm very excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you so much, Claudia. Claudia, if you can, share in the space thread a link to some content of where you automate your community. It is unbelievably amazing. My mind is blown every time you show me. It's a super efficient and super cool. So please do share that. Always happy to share my work, those. Yeah. Thank you. And last but not least, we have James. James, we did a workshop recently with PayPal developer and AG Grid. We've got a blog post coming out next week. So it's been great to get out of you recently, James. And look forward to more geeking out. So over to you. Oh, likewise Eddie, thank you. It's really hard to follow all those great introductions there. I think it's incredible the amount of energy in here. So far, it must be the Halloween vibes, maybe. But yeah, I mean, for me personally, it's been ages since I've done a hackathon. I used to do them all the time early on in my dev route career. But they seem to have gone on a high aides at least for me anyway. So I'm really keen to jump back in here. And I'm getting a bit of foam off from not actually being able to participate in it. But I guess the next best thing is to jump into spaces like this and just have a chat about it. And like you say, geek out. So yeah, really looking forward to it. For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm James. I head up Dev Rowell here at AG Grid. Been here for about three years or so. So it's been a really fun ride here. And yeah, excited to chat to you all a little bit more about this. Awesome. Well, I want to give myself a really quick intro because I think last time I might have forgotten. So I'm Eddie and I'm a developer advocate at PayPal Developers. And we're having a hackathon on at the moment, which I've shared in a Twitter space. Link. And also I can see Amanda and Andrew have also shared as well as a deetha, a hackathon so they're running as well. So do go check those out. There's lots of exciting things going on. So let's get started. Right. So I have some few questions just to get the conversation going. It's great to see. We've got Ashwin, Connie, the audience. I saw Mr. Hackathon was there a moment ago. Lots of great people and we can't wait to get you up on stage. So I know you've got loads of tips to share. We've got like people have said, we've got amazing people on stage. And I can't wait to learn from all of you. But I have a few questions that I think might be interesting to hear your thoughts. So the way around these spaces for anyone new is, please raise your hand and I will pass the mic over to you. So one of my first questions I would like to know is, what should people do before they start writing code for a hackathon? Because I know as like techies we get excited now with AI, we just want to kind of build something. I know I do. I'm the worst that I had new idea today for a project. And while I went for lunch, I got AI building it already and haven't really thought the project through. So we just want to get started. But what are some of the tips so people can be successful to win hackathons? Because some of these hackathons have some amazing big cash prizes. So we should take it seriously. So hands up going up. Right. OK, I think Francesco's hand went up first. Then Amanda, then Andrew, then Collie. OK, let's go. So over to you, Francesco. Yeah, sure. And yes, so I don't know if you asked what people are actually doing or what they should do. So let's go with what they should do. I think that from the perspective of a judge, the most important thing is to do something on point. Because I think there is nothing worse of trying to judge a project 3D. The melts like a project that already submitted somewhere. And it has been just a tune in for this hackathon because it was nice. So I think that hackathon should be on point. So I know maybe it sounds dumb, but maybe you should start from the truck. So it's like you're trying in a high school. In a final exam, they ask you something and you should talk about something. So here you should actually build something specifically for that, please. So that's more important than trying to have something already done. And then I think that the preparation is underrated because, of course, we urge writing something, but especially I think it also depends on how many people are in the group, but you should at least agree in a direction. We want to maybe you can brainstorm, maybe one idea per person. I found quite useful for people for ideas. And then it was basically vote. And this literally can take just minutes, but it's probably the most important part of the hackathon because if you pick the wrong idea, or maybe just because you want to hurry up, you might end up with maybe something that is not what you want. So everyone should at least agree in what you build. They're not just pick the first idea and you just build it. So this is a very simple tip, but I found many people just hurry up and instead you should the plan, plan it a bit, of course, based on the time and stuff, but usually there is time plan and you should actually use it. That's it. I love that. It's important to plan a bit. It's not too much. I think some people over plan, but the majority of people probably under plan, I know I'm one of those. And I recommend using the, like the GitHub project boards, like a canman board, just to kind of put down ideas and so forth. Right. Hands. I think it was a mandarinx. I've lost my life, I've written it down. Amanda, over to you. All right. Hello. So Eddie, you said before you write code and I definitely don't comment on hackathon thinking I'm going to write any code at this point. So what I would recommend is setting up your agent with any of the context you can from the companies that you think are like something you're going to build with. So like there's several companies usually at a hackathon. Go see if those companies have MCP servers. Go see if they have published skills that they keep up to date. If they have context that you can give your agent, because you're probably not familiar, deeply familiar with all the companies and you're going to want to be able to move fast. And if you're working agentically, make sure that your agent has the context to build correctly so that hopefully you have to go in and intervene as little as possible. And can just then take that great idea that you worked with your team on and pass that to your agent's environment and it'll already have all the context for the different tooling that you're going to want to work with. So that's what I would recommend right now. I love that. Such great advice. Like really concrete focus tips. Absolutely. Love that. Right. I can't remember the order. We got hands up. So we'll go on my screen. We'll do it in order of my screen. I'm sorry. We'll do Andrew next. Yeah. I mean, take all of the advice you've gotten so far. That is like that is the first device. I don't know. I think one of the interesting but simple ideas is come in with something and it doesn't even need to be a thing related to this technology. But come in with a.