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Hackathon people, share your experiences

Gerson Crisostomo
1 reply
My challenge in today's Hackathon is to improve the Hackathons participant experience. So I count on your opinion. Could you help me by answering some questions. 1) What were the experiences (good or bad) when participating in a Hackathon? 2) What's your biggest difficulty with hackathon events? 3) Which technologies did you use in your project?

Replies

Julie Gauthier
Hi Gerson! I've participated in a lot of hackathons, and currently organize them. 1) Hackathons can be a rollercoaster of emotion. The best experiences I have had have been the moments where I've figured something out and it works like I want it to work in the demo. Having mentors can help facilitate this. Other happy hackathon memories have been great meals. I remember which hackathons have great food. Meals are also a great time to meet new people. I also had some very positive experiences presenting at hackathons - the crowd is usually so encouraging. Honestly, the worst things that have happened at hackathons I've been at (besides encountering people that are just mean) are environmental annoyances - like not having anything to eat, music is loud or unpleasant, not enough outlets or bad wifi, room is too cold, etc. 2) I'm very stubborn and don't always ask for help when I should. I will struggle with technical challenges for too long, and get really stressed out. 3) I usually use whatever I've been working in the most lately to limit the learning curve. If I have an idea for a RESTful web app, Ruby on Rails. If a hardware project, whatever is appropriate for that. If mashing together APIs, PHP. If an artistic display, vanilla JavaScript. You can honestly usually fake whatever you're trying to achieve in HTML and CSS. I've lately been curious about using no-code solutions like Bubble and Webflow for Hackathons though.
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