bogged down by your day job? feeling like the more you work, the less fun coding gets? perhaps you’re a student and you’re overwhelmed by learning how to code realistic applications? maybe your weekends are simply uneventful. one possible solution is attending and competing at a hackathon. recently myself and some of my friends (who are current and former co-workers) on a whim competed at a hackathon called NASA Space Apps, six of us made a semi decent full stack web app where we would track NASA satellites and displayed what they saw in human readable formats, throughout those 48 hours we all collectively came to learn a couple of things about going to hackathons that i’d like to share.

it’s a fun social event

even if you don’t manage to build anything, there is still a weekend of hanging out with your friends, learning how other people solve problems, potentially some seminars, speak to people in the industry, and of course free food. sounds like a fun weekend to me. however to fully enjoy it, you should absolutely try and submit SOMETHING, even if it is complete and utter shit, the next time you go your project will be a little less shit, and that improvement will keep you hooked alongside the aforementioned great free perks (most of the time). for real though, while we were working on our project we got to talk to an employee at the Canadian Space Agency about his role and the technologies he uses day to day. we also got to speak with other groups, talking about what they’re doing, answering questions, etc.

it’s empowering

especially for intermediate+ level developers/engineers, it solves the question that percolates everyone’s head at some point or another: “if me and my friends got together to build something, how far and how fast could we go?” and i’ll tell you that you’d be really shocked at what you and your friends could accomplish. i’ll tell you now that our entire team was absolutely NOT losing sleep over the hackathon, in the absolute best case we’d show up at 9am and leave around 6-7pm, work a slight amount from home and sleep a full 8 hours or more, this is not bringing up the numerous times we all took breaks to shoot the shit and arrive hours late. in fact, two of our group members went to two SEPARATE weddings in the middle of the hackathon. so, in short, you don’t need to go absolutely balls to the wall to have fun and make a semi-competitive project.

you gain a fresh prespective

when you’re in a hackathon, you’re typically doing challenges in certain categories, if you haven’t already asked other groups how they’re solving similar problems, you really should! most groups love sharing what they’re working on and how, regardless of the whole competition aspect. worst case, you can take a look at other teams’ repos to see how they handled similar challenges as you. also, you get to measure what you did well and what you misprioritized.

tldr

if you’re bored with your weekends or at work, sign up for a hackathon that is preferrably in person, or sign up for your company’s internal hackathon, you get free food, talk to interesting people, shoot the shit with your friends, and mess with some technology that you’ve been meaning to or are completely inexperienced in. so go ask your friends/co-workers, even if you don’t submit it’s definitely worth a weekend.

project details

btw if you want to see our submission:

  • here’s the actual submission
  • here are the slides detailing a high level overview of the app
  • here’s the prod site (eventually this link will die)
  • here’s the repo
  • here’s the wiki (how to use the app and what to expect)

results

#1 - Windsor Local Event