What is a hackathon? What are team sizes?

@dkHack

What is a hackathon? - A hackathon is usually a day long (can be 36 hours, 48 hours, etc.) coding competition where software programmers, developers, designers, etc. come together to build and design something cool.Hackathons are a place where many passionate professionals or students in Technology and Business Development actively participate - form diverse teams, make their pitches, adds their expertise and work towards creating a solution.

@dkHack

It is one such opportunity where you make many new friends from diverse backgrounds whom you would have never met, and learn new things from mentors & teammates. Above all, Hackathon helps you to see a problem from multiple perspectives and arrive at a solution.

First:-will Talk about University yor College level Hackathons some of the best college or university level Hackathons include HackDTU , HacktheNorth , HackIITD , HackVIT , Hackiitd , I_Hack , Megathon and a few more that are organized Internationally or once in two years or so.

Second:-The Hackathons conducted open to the world Hackmit , HackPrinceton , UNESCO Hack , NWHack , HackDavis , Yhacks , Hackinit , MLHack these Hackathons are open to anyone to world to give the selection Rounds .

Third Hackathons conducted for corporate or startups Google Hackathon , MS Hack , IBM Hacks , Open Source Hacks .

@dkhack

Who can attend a hackathon? - Depends but for the most part ANYONE. Yep, you read it right. Anyone who is interested in computer programming and loves to learn and build cool stuff can attend. If a hackathon targets a specific audience (ex, college students), then obviously only college students are allowed to attend but there are hackathons for everyone.

But isn’t hacking illegal? - Haha, my favorite part! The word “hack” has so much negativity attached to it that most people think hackathons are a way to “hack” into something. NOOOO. Hacking is basically building something. It could be anything.

Do I need to have programming experience? - NO. You don’t. The organizers usually hold workshops throughout the hackathon for anyone who is new to programming or someone who wishes to learn more about a particular topic. Mentors are also available 24/7. So if you go to a hackathon without knowing what you want to do, that’s totally fine because you will have these mentors at your service to help and guide you.

@dkHack

How much do I have to pay to attend a hackathon? - It’s FREE. Almost all hackathons are free of cost. Until now, I haven’t heard of any which charges registration fees. Also, some hackathons provide travel reimbursements. :)

Is it a team event? - Yes. So the whole point of forming teams and working on a project gives you the opportunity to work in a real life setting. I mean seriously, that’s how it works in the industry. You have to learn to work with people from different background, different skill set, etc. What better way than a hackathon to get used to it? Teams include a maximum of 4 people. You can work all by yourself but I would highly recommend you work in a team. You’ll learn a lot. If you don’t know anyone at the hackathon, that’s okay. Most hackathons have “Meet-and-Greet” events before the actual event where you get to talk to attendees and look for teammates.

@dkHack

What are other benefits?- The best part about Hackathons is

Networking - you meet many like minded people and Industry people who can help you and guide you at certain stages or points.

Working late - It provides you an experience to stay late at night and work continues for hours

New Skills - Even if you are unable to build something at the Hackathon , you will tend to learn something new .

New Ideas- while you see other teams Pitching at the end , you get lots of good and better Ideas

@dkHack

Why should I attend a hackathon? - Why not? It’s a win- win situation for you. And here’s why:

FREE FOOD.

@dkHack
FREE SWAG. (I live for them.)
Meet new people
Meet recruiters
Not expensive.
Can help land an interview if you are looking for job opportunities.
LEARN.

My Personal Experience Hackathon coding challenge (24-36 ) hour

What can I hack at a hackathon? - So as I mentioned above, you can build anything. A website, a web app, Android/iOS App, Chrome extension, whatever you want to. Majority of the hackathons do not have “themes” or specific requirements that you need to target. It’s a free environment. you can literally code whatever you want to. But if you’re too focused on one particular theme, say Sustainability or something only related to web development, I’m sure there are themed- hackathons.

@dkHack

Trust me, go to one hackathon and see for yourself.

As the very name suggests in hackathon we try to use tech to hack into real world problem to solve them better. It's a 24–72 hours product making competition where every team needs to develop a product from scratch during those pretty hours. A team size can vary from 2–6 depending on the organization who is organizing it.

I would like to share my first hackathon experience at Hackathon organized by hexathon under IBM . Our team consisted of Me and my friend from self employer. Being a full stack developer it was a great opportunity to learn and meet new people. Our team name was “Brain Booster”. We despatched from our Room at 6:00AM and reached the destination around 8:00 AM.

(Me in the middle)

The first keynote session was to start at 9:00AM. After gathering in the auditorium with hundreds of other developers our first keynote session was with Dr. Mocque from Data Scientist. He greeted all of us present there and gave a lecture on Artificial intelligence.

After an hour we had a break and then attended a workshop on Aws & DevOps ( God knows what the instructor was teaching ). Then again after these 2 hours workshop we had a workshop on ethical hacking. It was an interactive session with the instructors. Some people were even pranked to reveal their Facebook authentication details by phishing.

This workshop was great. Then we had our last keynote session on Entrepreneurship by an entrepreneur ( Co-founder of Internet Of Think Technologies ). Moments after his presentation we had our hackathon theme discussion with around 600 developers all are belong to different Software industry.

At 7:30PM we were allote our area to work on. At 8:00PM the hackathon started. First few hours took the initial idea to develop. At 12:00AM it was the first round of idea judgement.

Our idea was “Smart Water Management Portal integrated with water management system and smart way to save the saving water to abuse and waste”. Our idea seemed healthy to the judges and appreciated us for our idea. Then came the development process. It was 3:00AM. We designed user registration forms and login forms.

( Feeling sleepy )

Then at 4:00AM we slept. Again waking up at 7:00AM I started coding and developing the product. It was tiresome working continuously till 1:30 PM with just a half-hour break for breakfast. Still then our product was not ready and water management system was not even started. We focused on UI development of our parking system to make it mobile friendly.

Now came the 2nd judgement round. We were criticised by the judge for making a website. He liked our idea but told us that we should have made a mobile application instead of a website and could have integrated Google maps with it. Since we didn't knew working with Google maps API and creating an Android application we couldn't help it out. We lost our hopes of winning.

@dkHack

(Results out)

At 5:00PM the results were out. The judges selected top 19 teams for re-evaluation out of more than 290 teams. We found our name wasn't present in that list. Being heavily tired and sleepy we despatched from the IBM, reached our hostel by 9:00PM and had a great sleep that night.

I would suggest to participate in hackathons. It was my first experience and helped me to find my learning curriculum.

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