Preparing for your first hackathon in a week

A week out

Get to grips with the theme. Organisers usually announce a direction in advance. Read what's normally built in that area and look at a couple of existing solutions — not to copy, but to avoid reinventing the obvious on the night.

Assemble a team if you don't have one. Three or four people is the working size. What matters isn't individual strength but that roles don't duplicate: two people on markup and none on data is a poor combination.

Five days out

Set up everything you'll need. Environment, repository, access for everyone, a way to deploy. This is the most painful waste of time: three hours of installation at the start is a familiar story.

Build scaffolding. An empty project that already runs and deploys behind a link. Rules usually allow this — a finished product isn't permitted, a bare skeleton is. Check with the organisers.

Three days out

Agree how you'll work. Where you discuss, where tasks live, how often you sync. Simplest: a short check-in every three or four hours.

Agree who takes what. Not vaguely — specifically: this person does data, this one the interface, this one the demo.

The day before

Sleep. Seriously. A sleepless night before a day of work guarantees collapse by morning.

Pack the boring things. Chargers, adapters, water, food. Small stuff that eats time and patience on site.

At the start

An hour on agreements. What we're building, what counts as done, what gets cut if time runs short. That last one especially: decide in advance what the demo can live without.

Define the minimum. One working path from end to end beats five half-built pieces. What you show has to work.

The big mistake

Taking on too much. Almost every first-time team plans twice what they can deliver and ends up demoing a pile of unfinished parts.

The rule is simple: whatever you've planned, cut it in half. What's left will probably need trimming too.

Afterwards

Agree what happens to the result. If everyone liked it, the project can be continued and brought to a state you'd happily show an employer. Then the day becomes not a line on a CV but finished work with a clear account of who did what.