This belongs to Andrew Anderson, Steven D. Riley, and myself.

What I learned:

My first hackathon I left early, before it started because I was too shy and didn’t know anyone. That regret still sits like a pit in my stomach. But I swore I would let it motivate me.

And the second hackathon, our team won the grand prize!

This leads me to the first thing I learned: If you can’t create a front-end or back-end website/app yet in a short period of time,

scratch and claw to get a front-end and back-end developer in your team. Preferable before you go, of course.

I was lucky enough to meet Andrew through my bootcamp, a wiz with Angular 6+ and my software mentor. As luck would have it, he moved to Austin in the same week as becoming my mentor. Austin is my dream-job location. What great luck!

We met Steven at the Hackathon, a recent Bootcamp grad and Cloud Solution Engineer at Oracle willing to implement back-end Express/MySQL for our idea.

Which reminds me the second lesson for hackathon first-timers:

Bring the best idea ever.

Put some work into the idea. Bring some notes. If you can’t talk about it, you don’t know it well enough.

Here was our idea:

Learn With Me offers coding-mentorship-as-a-service, curating the litany of fragmented coding resources into a comprehensive curriculum complete with one-on-one coaching at the fraction of the cost of traditional coding schools.

If you’ve never attended a hackathon,

Don’t let that keep you from attending a hackathon.

You will struggle, but you will undoubtedly have something worthwile to contribute to a team if you prepare prior to attending the hackathon.

Ask all the questions, be polite, smile, and introduce yourself to anyone and everyone.

Take the leap.