Advice for a new hacker
/So you’ve signed up for a hackathon — or maybe you’ve seen an event and you’re still thinking about it.
First thing: I can almost guarantee that you will not regret it, so if you haven’t committed yet, I challenge you to go and sign up now.
But even once you’ve chosen to go, maybe you feel nervous about your skills, or are worried about spending two days with strangers, or aren’t sure about the idea of competitive coding. Someone asked me recently how to prepare — technically and mentally — for the event.
I should say that I’ve only participated in a couple of hackathons, so I definitely don’t know everything there is to know. But I have organized more than 20 hackathons, and helped people skill up for them and (I hope!) enjoy them. Here are the top 10-ish things you can to do to get the most out of the event:
Brush up on your coding. Before the event, find out a bit about what kinds of projects are in the offing. If it’s a machine learning theme, brush up on your data science. Maybe image processing or text processing will be needed. Data management skills and database manipulation are always appreciated. Familiarty with a cloud environment, e.g. AWS, will help.
Find a friend. Either take someone with you, or find a friendly face when you get there. It’s 100% possible to navigate the experience on your own, but much more fun with a partner.
Dive in. You get out of the event what you put in. It’s like most learning experiences. You need an open mind, an enthusiastic demeanour, and a can-do attitude.
Contribute. There’s never enough time, so you are a much-needed part of your team, but unless there’s a strong effort to coordinate the project, it’ll be a bit unstructured. You’ll have to take the initiative on things.
Use a kanban. To help team members see the big picture and select tasks for themselves, put them on stickies on a nearby board. Make 3 areas: ‘to do’, ‘in progress’ and ‘done’. The goal is to move them from left to right.
Ask for help. Every event Agile runs has non-hackers around to help out with stuff — anything from dietary needs to datasets to coding advice. Don’t get stuck on something, find someone to help you.
Take breaks. You and your team should go for a short walk every 90 minutes or so. Relax a bit, but also get caught up: get progress reports from everyone, re-evaluate the goals, identify issues. You will find more clarity away from your keyboards.
Work backwards from the demo. A good strategy is to outline what would make a killer demo of the project you have selected. Include at least one “Wow” feature if at all possible. Then work out what you need to either fake or build to make that demo. Build what you can, fake the rest.
Check in with the other teams. This might not fly at highly competitive events, but at more casual affairs or if everyone is working on different projects, try chatting to some other teams, especially during breaks.
Label your equipment. Hackathons are pretty chaotic, and although 99.9% of hackers are awesome, it’s still a roomful of strangers, so label the gear you care about. And of course keep your phone and computer locked.
Reciprocate. Almost all these bits of advice have corollaries: be friendly and welcoming, accept contributions from others, give help if asked, and so on. Hackathons are social events as much as technical ones — enjoy meeting and collaborating with others.
If you have signed up for an event — I hope you love it! Do let us know how you get along. Or, if you’ve already been to a hackathon and have some advice to share — leave a comment below.
If you’re looking for an event to go to and you’re in western Europe — here’s one! It’s the FORCE Machine Learning Hackathon in Stavanger, Norway. I recently wrote about it — check it out.
If you’re looking for subsurface or geoscience project ideas, then I have a lot of reading for you. Check out the long list of hackathons reports on this blog. You can also dive into the Software Underground Slack to discuss project ideas there.
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