My First Hackathon

I had an absolute blast setting time aside to complete my blog site during the time period! While I didn't work on the next best thing, I defintely strengthened my fundamentals in React, Next.js, and Contentful's GraphQL API during this time. I'm super happy with the result and really love the design!

What's a Hackathon?

Hackathons are tech events hosted by companies or organizations where partcipiants (usually software engineers, developers, and programmers) create an application within an allotted timeframe. Hackathon length ranges from anywhere between 6 hours to a week, with most events occuring over 1-2 days. Typically there are prizes for winners which can either be monetary or non-monetary.

While hackathons are typically participated in teams, you can participate in them by yourself. To make the deadline however, you may need to reduce the scope of your project and will have to. Major League Hacking (MLH) has a great discord where you can find teammates for hacks hosted by their organization.

My Experience

I set aside the weekend specifically for this event with one goal in mind: build a website that represents my current underestanding of my technology with Jamstack. Overall, I think I did a great job - the base version of the website I built has a design that I'm happy with (besides one small spacing error) and my React fundamentals have improved. In addition, I'm more familiar with structuring my Contentful space and much more confident in my dynamic routing and loading with Next.js.

I have no complaints with MLH's event coordination - although we had a small delay for the event stream, everything was laid out clearly. Additionally, the event staff was in the discord giving us updates and answering all our questions. MLH also had fun mini-events that I look forward to participating in next time! This time however, I felt like I needed to get the most of my functional hours before I burnt out (appx. 12 hours a day!).

Next Steps

I'm looking forward to competing in more hackathons - at the moment, my next event is TechTogether Miami! I'm glad to see events focused for minority groups in Tech and hope to meet many individuals over there.

On the development end, I'm planning on implementing animations to improve the look and feel of my site through Tailwind CSS. I'm content with my sites from an accessible and design standpoint, but I think animations will help push them over the edge. There's still a lot to learn with React and Next.js as well - the journey of learning never stops.

Conclusion

Hackathons are a great way to build connections, push your skills to the limit, and create portfolio pieces or talking points in conversations. I had a blast at MLH's HibernationHacks hackathon; I would highly recommend their weekend events to get your foot in the door.

If you would like to reach out or have any questions, feel free to contact me through my LinkedIn or GitHub!