Here's some quick resouces and advice for all Hackathon Attendees for the TechHub Hackathon 2024
Tricks to win the Hackathon
Building your project:
Create the idea and make the pages/screens in paper (or board) first. Then step through the steps in paper and see if there's pages you're missing. These paper screens will help everyone create their portion.
First create a repo and create a basic page with all the screens and the routing with each screen not having anything but the title of the screen. This way everyone creating the pages can go to their page and work on theirs and everyone knows which page they're working on. Also this eliminates any merge issues.
Build BIG things first. Seriously. Only the functionality. Make it beautiful, and build the "other" pages LATER
No authentication. Unless your project needs different users to login, do NOT have authentication and security built in. It only slows you down, and no one critics your code.
Have forms PRE-BUILT. Yes. If there's a signup form or a long form; have it pre-filled. We all get that it normally get's filled in but no one wants to sit there waiting for you for 2 minutes filling in a form we all understand needs to be filled in.
Fake it until you make it. MAKE FIRST the page show something from a local hard coded variable and THEN pull the data from an API. Make sure you can do all the other important things before you worry about simple things that can be added later.
No one is listening to you. No need to keep it down and not share that briliant idea. Everyone is busy with their briliant idea and will NOT take anything you make.
Do what you KNOW. Hackathons are fast and NOT the place to try a new language or platform.
Don't blame...FIX - Get stuff done. no one cares why it's not working. fix it
The Presentation
Present from One computer. You don't know how long it takes to switch computers. no one wants that!
Tell us a story. Sell us on your idea. Make it exciting. But get to the demo. You need both but the demo should take most of the time.
Show off - Wow us with your project. I don't care if it's boring to you. It's new and excisting to us
Don't stop if there's a problem - There's always someone that takes a little longer, or doesn't work the first time. Don't debug. Don't figure out what happened. You'll loose your audience. Move on and keep going.
DON'T GO OVER TIME. EVER!
NEVER interupt the person persenting. EVEN if they're saying something wrong. You'll look bad in front of the judges
NEVER agrue with the judges. You can repeat something they didn't hear, but NEVER correct them