This post is for young developers, students or anybody who is interested in Hackathons. If you don't know what a hackathon is, it is a competition for programmers. Something like a programming marathon.
Why there is a "hack" instead of programmingthon or something? Well, this is my personal opinion, in hackathons, they don't expect you to hack like illegally. The idea is to do something fast and not the way someone normally do. Normally for hackathons, you get around 24 to 48 hours to build something (maybe weeks depending on the event). In order to build something that fast, you gotta use some tricks, or tweak a little than what people normally do.
What do I know about hackathons to write about them? Well, I don't like to brag about myself but yeah I've participated into number of local and international hackathons and won few prizes as well. So I would know a thing or two about them :)
As a developer I love hackathons for many reasons.
1. Food!
If you go to an organized hackathon which you can participate in their hosting premises, you get to eat awesome food like 24 hours. I've been to couple of hackathons hosted by Software companies (Motorola, WSO2, Axiata and many more) and universities, so Yay for their awesome food and refreshments!
2. Get to know your potential and expand your limits
When I was a student at the university, I had a really cool gang who would like to participate in hackathons. Maybe because of food :P but we went somehow.
When you get to develop something within a couple of days, you get to know how good you are at coding, understanding, learning new stuff etc. Basically you get to know what you could improve about your self. What you know and what you don't know. Compare yourself with others members and other teams.
Also you would know how to learn something quickly and how to code something with minimum bugs in a really short time.
I got a story to share about that. When I was a CS student, we thought of going to this algorithm sort of hackathon (pretty much like IEEE Extreem) organized by one of the local universities. So one of our team member suggested, "Hey, let's do this with Python!". Well, I was a Java guy and never did python coding before. And we were like "Okay but we don't even know the language". So, that guy gave us a brief summary within like 30-60 minutes about the basic python syntax on the night before the competition. So we went to the competition, coded in Python and we were like the 5th place from more than 20 teams. Python is not so bad, I still love it.
3. Learn new technology
Different Hackathons expect to get the projects done in different concepts, and using different technologies. Some maybe about telecommunication eg: SMS, USSD, IVR and something maybe different like machine learning and so on.
With that, you will get to know what are the available technologies in the industry and how you can use them.
Also about various platforms and APIs. Because most of the corporate sponsored Hackathons expect you to use one or two APIs or platforms from their products.
4. Experience in various projects
Normally hackathons will require you to develop something aligning to a topic/s or themes. Time to time it may be different. It can be related to health care, global crisis, fun, profit or anything. Each time you will get to know about a whole different area of technology applications.
Therefore, within a very short period of time, you'll experience (not completely but some) a software development life cycle of an entirely new industry sector from product requirements to deploying in production.
5. Overcome the fear of new technology or new projects.
Something in common in many young CS/IT students would be they don't really get to do so many complete projects during their academic studies. When they step into the industry, with the lack of experience they tend to grow some fear of using new technology or working on a new project.
If you've been to some Hackathons, you have experience around various projects and you would know end to end about developing something from the scratch. It maybe not as big as the projects you get in the industry. Maybe you did some hard coding and some quick hacks in the hackathon, but still, you will learn to overcome your fear of new technology or getting your hands dirty with actual industrial projects.
6. Improve your presentation skills.
As students, you already may have done some presentations in the academic life and yeah that is true. However, pitching your idea to some complete strangers in a really short time is a challenge.
I remember one time we went to a hackathon and there were around 20 teams. The time each team had to pitch their project idea was 1 minute. We were suppose to communicate a crazy idea of a complex system to some strangers and impress them within 60 seconds! That was crazy and it was the hardest presentation I've ever done so far lol. However we made it.
Sometimes you will get technical glitches, embarrassing errors during these. Still they are great experiences. Presentation is not all about doing everything right. It is about presenting your failures as well, but you can turn them into a positive aspect and present.
With the practice of that kind of presentations, you'll be fearless do to any presentation in your life ever again.
7. Recognition and reputation
As a developer, the reputation is really valuable when it comes to your future career. When you participate in to various hackathons, you will already have an idea about the industry when you actually step into your career after education. Also you may already know some people from the industry.
Sometimes you'll even get internship opportunities just because of your reputation and recognition with your hackathons.
You will get to know other team members and socialize with them. So when you go to the industry, there will be some familiar faces around you.
It will be a great addition to your CV!
8. Prizes and gifts
If you win somehow, then you'll get some awesome prizes and sometimes certificates too.
It could be cash prizes or cool devices, gift vouchers, and so on.
Some times you'll get some gifts like cool T-shirts just for participation as well. In that case, it's a win even you didn't have a place.
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ps.
I just wanted to motivate young developers or students to participate more in hackathons, hope you get something from this post. Maybe I'll write another post about how to win a hackathon later ;) KIT.
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