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.