My Experience at the yuuvis Hackathon (my first hackathon!)

*originally published on my LinkedIn on August 31, 2019

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in the yuuvis hackathon in downtown Austin, TX. I had never participated in a hackathon before but that didn’t matter because guess what, most of the team I was on had never done one either! In fact, many people at the event said that it was their first hackathon. It certainly didn’t stop some of the eventual winners from entering haha.

What was the experience like?

Having never done a hackathon before, I had no idea that to expect really. I did expect a sleepless night or two but thankfully I did get some shut-eye in (still ended up sleep-deprived for a bit but nothing serious). There was a workshop + networking event hosted the night before the official hackathon began and it was very helpful to attend that since I had the time to do so. It was actually there where I met up with a potential team and started discussing an idea I had brewing in my mind about what to do for a project. I had never met a single person on my eventual team before the event but I really just sat by a group of people who seemed nice enough to talk to and it grew from there.

We discussed possible ideas up to an hour even after the networking event ended. In the morning, we met up at Galvanize where the hackathon was being held. Food was being served all weekend long for the hackathon and my inner grad student was very satisfied (when you have been a grad student before, you learn to scope out where the free food is. Old habits die hard 😅). The team from yuuvis and BeMyApp were incredibly helpful in matching up teams and finding places to put people. In other words, there is zero reason to worry about not having a team when going in (I feel like I am emphasizing this a lot. But it’s very true and it probably does stop some people from joining hackathons who otherwise would).

After initial kickoff and grabbing some swag bags, it was time to get to work. My team and I further narrowed down and refined our idea until we had something that we felt could be delivered by the next day. A big challenge of these hackathon projects is limiting the scope and focus of your idea until you have something that is deliverable in the amount of time you have (i.e. the Minimum Viable Product). I had my task to do, which was to investigate NLP in Python and learn how to pull that into the application we were building. It was a very hack-y thing I ended up producing but hey, it’s called a hackathon for a reason, right? Along the way, the yuuvis mentors were very helpful in explaining how to use the APIs that were required for the project as well as giving us much needed break times (with stretching and VR game fun thrown in!).

We worked pretty late into the night and then some in the morning after meeting up again to produce what we could in time. We also had to create a short 4 minute presentation and test out a demo run in front of some yuuvis/BeMyApp representatives. Finally, it was time to present and also see what each of the other teams were up to themselves! My team didn’t win in the end but that hardly mattered. We were able to see some truly creative projects being produced and learned a lot in the process. Not just about technical skills, but about how to work on a viable, creative idea that is also deliverable as well as working on a dedicated team of contributors. I could hardly have asked for a better first time experience for a hackathon!

What were some lessons learned?

1. A strong and focused idea is paramount in these hackathons. You have a very limited amount of time so don’t allow scope creep to happen and focus on getting the main idea down but also making sure everyone is on the same page at the same time. You should spend a significant amount of time making sure of this. In fact, I’d probably say having a great idea with some amount of completion is better than having a halfway thought out idea with complete execution (although it depends on the requirements of the hackathon really).
2. A complementary team is better than having a big team with lots of resources. I definitely saw this a lot and this is related to point #1 for possible scope creep. Very few of the teams who won were at maximum capacity (5 people). It also doesn’t matter if not everyone on the team knows the same coding languages (I myself was the only one who really knew Python on my team as everyone else knew Java or Javascript it seemed like). It is more important that everyone’s skills and contributions complement each other well.
3. Stick until the very end. Showcase what you have and what you have learned but also learn from other teams if you can. Some teams did not come back in the morning, which was too bad. It’s a lot of effort to even start these projects and really, it doesn’t matter if you don’t finish everything. See what you can pick up in that case (oh also, the food is still free hahaha).
4. Don’t be concerned about winning. Focus more on what you can learn. It is unlikely you will win anyway. It’s really more of a cherry-on-top sort of thing. Learn what you can and iterate on it for another time!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.