How to win Hackathons?

Sumit Raj

https://sumitraj.in

@sumit12dec

About Me:

• Techie | Author | Trainer | Mentor | Startups
• Working as Engineering Lead at Unacademy
• Authored internationally published book "Building Chatbots with Python", translated in Portuguese, Korean.
• Avid Quora writer - Over a million views so far.
• Guest speaker and hackathon lover.

What is good to be demoed?

• A working solution on localhost
• Always brownie points if you can deploy on web(Heroku, AWS, pythonanywhere, Netlify)
• A script or utility that runs from command line and solves the given problems.
• Covers at least 50% of the judging criteria items.

Things to consider in slides

• Never be verbose in the presentation
• Keep it like a short story
• Problem -> Proposed Solutions -> How you solved -> Future Scopes
• Always add technology used.
• Everyone around you is smart and passionate so prepare more for QnA than slides.

How to present?

• Do it like a team
• Individual person talks about his/her piece and limit to 2-3 person
• If you don't know you don't know. It's fine. Say you don't know and agree.
• Do practice in the room before you have to speak. It helps in a good start.
• Keep tabs, POSTMAN, document, outputs ready in case needed
• Always keep a recording on the safer side.

Tackling QnA

• Most of the questions might be asked that judges see in your slides or demo
• Be a judge yourself and see what would you ask if you were demoing yourself?
• It's okay if you don't know some answer but important that you can relate to that and talk about it.

Things to note:

• Many cases the final team to demo are only 10% of the total registrants or people who came for the Hackathon.
• Some will have demo but not upto the mark. Don't let yourself feel competitive until you see the competition
• Try to focus on your ideation.
• Don't try to re-invent the wheel.
• Build a quick and dirty solution first (Later keep on adding).
• If something is working then do not do last minute changes.
• Be busy building your solution, no sneak peek into others.
• Respect hackathons and stay till the end.

Thank You.