How to Win a Hackathon
What do Square, Getaround, PhoneGap, OAuth, and Apple’s TestFlight have in common? They each have origins at Developer Camp.
It’s no accident—this is just a sample. You can have breakout success like this when you win an idea contest, sponsor the winners, or just get involved with the right community.
So, how do you find success at a hackathon like this? Follow the pattern of innovation: focus, simplicity, and craftsmanship.
Cherry Pick Your Category
I would advise any participant to pick an underpopulated or uncontested category to pursue greatness. Oftentimes there are sponsors giving recognition to anyone using their developer offering, and in some cases may reward more than one winner.
We have standard categories every year:
- Best Open Source
- Best Developer Tool or Library
- Best New Developer
- Best Game
- Best Web App
- Best Satellite Event App
- Most Educational
- Best Health Care
- Best Women Entrepreneur
- Sacrifice to the Demo Gods — given to the participants whose presentation fails in a spectacular way
We don’t award runners-up, though we do make up categories for groups that we think are great but don’t fit in a specific category. Know the categories at your hackathon, and their criteria for judging. You can win simply by picking the right award.
Balance Your Team and Work Style
Give each person something simple but important to contribute. Find balance in your team, amongst designers and developers. Let them work independently and then schedule some time for integration later in the weekend.
Also, balance your personal ergonomics and productivity. Make sure your head and neck are at the proper angle (slightly inclined), and you have a proper mouse and keyboard. Here are a few ergonomics hacks:
- Rest your keyboard on your lap.
- Pile books or boxes to make a quick and dirty laptop stand.
- Bring a mousepad—it makes all the difference.
- Never rest your wrists when you type or use a mouse—use the whole arm like a pianist.
- Set a work timer to remind you to take a short break every hour.
Lastly, balance your energy. This means drinking lots of water (which will also help you get up and stretch more often), and eating well. Avoid alcohol, too much caffeine, and sugary snacks.
Open Source Your Work
Consider open-sourcing at least some of your code for the weekend. In the case of Developer Camp, it gives contestants additional consideration by our judges. Craftsmanship is reflected in the way you work. If you are open to critique and input, the way forward is paved by many more helpful hands.
Open-sourcing one’s work does not mean that the creators cannot profit from it. There are many types of open source licenses, so take a look and see which one is right for your team.
You might also consider using the open source of others and extending it as part of your work. This can attract great talent and also can lead to opportunities outside of the contest.
The Developer Camp brand itself is “open source” in the sense that we encourage communities all over the world to use our name, logo, and event plan. As long as they abide by the community principles, we encourage and promote these groups so that the community is now in the thousands—reaching every continent.
Offer Help and Build Your Reputation
For the most exposure, the most effective strategy I have seen is to put up a “Help Offered” sign. Sit in a central location, and make it known what you are great at doing, or what you would like to help people to do. Make it clear how far you’re willing to go, and create some boundaries so that people don’t rely on you for the entire weekend.
The major advantage to this strategy is that, by getting involved with many teams you increase your odds of winning. In our community, contributors are given special credit for helping others, in the form of tickets. If you have been helped by someone, come to the organizers and we’ll give you a ticket to hand to your helper. At the end of the contest, the person with the most tickets gets the Grand Prize.
Not every event has this feature, but the principle stands: the most precious commodity within any developer community is reputation. If you are known as a generous person, your good karma will be rewarded. Examples of this include:
- FoodSpotting (Winner 2009 “Best Social iPhone App”) discovered their founders at the event, and subsequently sold to OpenTable. Founder Alexa Andrzejewski later contributed FilterKit to open source, and comes back every year to participate.
- iUI (Winner 2007 “Best Open Source”) developer Joe Hewitt went on to build the first version of the Facebook app that year. Joe is also the author of FireBug. iUI won again in 2013 when developers continued the work that Joe had started.
- Longtime sponsors of the Open Source category at Developer Camp, Chaotic Moon Studios bought DollarApp, another contributor and sponsor of the camp who helped them find great developers to get started. They not only went on to dominate the mobile app development space together—for years—but sold their enterprise as a whole to Accenture.
So much of our work stands on the shoulders of others, and it’s not just good karma to give back—it pays.
Focus on Presentation
Judges and audiences will only appreciate your work if you can describe it with passion and clarity. Here are a few presentation tips:
- Describe the problem you are solving. Then tell the audience how your solution is unique.
- Bring the description of your idea down to 140 characters, and think of it as a marketing tag line.
- If you’re having trouble getting the demo to work correctly every time, record a video or screen capture of the experience.
- Try not to rely on the WiFi network, as it can get overloaded during presentation time. Cellular service can sometimes be more reliable then. Have a personal hotspot as a backup plan.
- If you’ve got more than one presenter, consider a conversational style, showcasing the voice of each presenter.
- Hold the microphone close to your mouth when you speak.
- Engage the audience — ask them a question, or ask for a show of hands, or try to generate a response like laughter or surprise.
- People will forget who you are, they will forget what you have said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
In general, plan your demonstration to take less than the time allotted on stage, and try to speak as slowly as possible. Give the audience time to digest your information, like a politician making a point. The more relaxed and confident you are on stage, the better your performance and reception.
Seek to Learn
With the proper attitude, you are guaranteed a minimum of the following:
- Idea Audit — come away with a peer-reviewed constructive critique of your dream.
- Self-Development — gain new skills needed to make your idea come to life.
- New Connections — meet specialists with complimentary skills and experience.
Bring a friend, a colleague, or a relative; find a mentor, a co-founder, or a partner. Start a community of your own! Go in with the attitude that you will learn something about yourself, and you will always win.
You don’t have to take my word for it.
Follow These Success Stories
A win or encounter at an event like this is just the beginning of a long road to success. The biggest hurdle is sometimes just to get started, or to get noticed. That’s why these stories are so similar. They each got a critical boost from their involvement:
- I introduced my former co-worker and contributor Jack Dorsey to Square founding engineer Tristan O’Tierney at the camp in 2008. I soon afterwards found early engineers Cameron Walters and Randy Reddig for them via the camp community as well. I was also an early tester of the service, and the first to demonstrate it in public. Square later became a sponsor, and of course went public.
- PhoneGap was a contestant in 2008— they were shortly acquired by our host, Adobe. Now they are a major software offering in open source.
- OAuth drafted an initial specification on site at Developer Camp in 2007, with the help of one of the camp’s founders. Now it’s the dominant secure authentication standard.
- The TouchCode repository open-sourced during the 2008 event was not only used by the Obama ’08 iPhone App team (made up of volunteers from the camp community), but was also contracted for use in the first version of the Whole Foods app. It is still maintained for public use today.
- In 2009, Getaround won for Best Money Making App. They found their co-founder and CTO Eliott Kroo at the camp, a longtime participant. For their next act they won TechCrunch Disrupt, leading co-founder Jessica Scorpio to write a helpful article about how to win that event. Now they have over a hundred employees nationwide.
- Burst.ly sponsored Developer Camp in 2010, then acquired TestFlight which sponsored in 2011, and together were acquired by Apple. TestFlight itself was created by an alumnus and former winner of the camp.
A strong foundation and early success story is crucial to a startup. None of these groups rested on their first break. They all came back again and again with the same positive attitude in the face of daunting odds. You can do it, too.
