This last weekend I got to participate in #INCapitolHack. A hackathon to help create solutions for the city of Indianapolis Indiana. This was my first hackathon and I wanted to share some of my experience with other working-to-be developers.
The event started Friday night with an overview of the event to come and team creation time. One of the biggest thing I will say is get on a team before the event. This might seem a hard task if you’re like me and are new to social development and only been to a meetup or two. My advice here is go social. I sent out messages on twitter, flowdock, and meetup asking if anyone from the local Ruby group would be attending the hackathon. I ended up messaging a fellow I met at the Bloomington ruby meetup when I saw him RSVP’d to the event on another meetup page. He had also found someone on meetup and we had our team.
The reason why I say doing use the help of the hackathon to get on a team is because I overheard the organizers the next day talking about creating teams the day before. In one guy’s words “I just put all the dead weight on one team”. I find this is horrible as hopeful developers can learn a lot of experienced ones in hackathons and while they might be “dead weight” split around evenly you can really help the tech community grow. Something they were claiming to do.
As for the mindset of “I don’t know enough to do this”. If you know some front end stuff including HTML and CSS then you can be helpful. Going in I have never touched any part of the MEAN stack, however that is what we were going with. I stayed up late the first night getting my laptop ready for the next day as the team chatted on Slack, and looked through some of the aspects of the MEAN stack.
The key here is having someone on your team who is experienced, and allowing them to pick the development stack as they can really be a team leader and help in your 24-hour crash course into this new tech. As well if you created the team early enough before the event you can all be team programing and learning the stack before the event.
However, after the event was over, we might not have one but we made new friends and learned new technology. As well for me I gained the confidence that I can learn quickly and become competent enough in start producing in a short amount of time in a new stack. This has pushed me enough to know I can survive as a Jr. Developer.
I can’t stress it more, if you’re trying to become a developer, get out and go to hackathons. The experience in team work, deadlines, knowledge, and producing under stress is unmatched in anything else you can get in a short 24-hour timespan.
As always thanks for reading find more on my blog at Program Practical, and follow me on twitter for more daily updates and post on my journey from Senior IT Admin to Junior Developer. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.