I joined based on a friend invitation, then he didn’t attend...
It was two days hackathon...
Spent the first day trying to find any thing to do... but didn’t!
Slept in the place chatting and socializing...
In the second day, I found interesting JavaScript library, and decided to invest my time trying it...
Built a prototype in two hours, photoshop a presentation in two hours... waited 3 hours to the end of the event... present my Working POC...
Won second place and qualified to the world wide competition!

It was my first ever hackathon. Initially, I registered with my friend who is a non coder but want to experience the thrill of joining a hackathon. But when we arrived at the event, someone older than us was added to our team because he was solo at that time. Eventually, this old guy (not too old, around his 20s) ( and let’s call him A) and I got close.
We chose the problem where one is tasked to create an ML model that can predict the phenotype of a plant based on genotypic data. Before the event, I didn’t have any background in machine learning, but A was so kind to teach me.
I learned key terms in ML, was able to train different models, and we ended up using my models as the final product. Though the highest accuracy I got for one of my model was 52%, but it didn’t discouraged me.
We didn’t won, however. But it was a great first time experience for me.
Also, he gave me an idea in pitching, because he was also taking MS in Data Science ( I think ) and he had a great background in sales as well, so yeah I got that too.

Haven't had many (4) and haven't had specific good ones but at the third (if I remember correctly), we had about half an hour to finish (24 hours one) and I made a change which I forgot and since my git skills were non-existent....

We had nothing than a working login page to show after 24 hours 😅

It was a hackathon about this new very interesting totally-not-abused technology called Blockchain, so obviously I ignored everything and focused on picking up this cute tsundere girl (I did).
And somehow still got 2nd place lol  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My first hackathon when I was in my university. I never used to work on any side projects apart from assignments and academic projects. I was so shocked when I saw that people were so dedicated in developing a working product in a weekend sacrificing sleep and food. I got so depressed that I wasn't doing anything and people around me were doing so much!!!!! That's when I was motivated to learn more, do more, work more. After this, I never missed a single hackathon while I was studying :) I'm so much better at what I do now because of hackathons.

It was called a hackathon, but was probably more a CTF on a distributed TOR network. Organized by Dutch tax police (FIOD) for students. Finished it single-handledly in 18 hours, in front of several teams consisting of 6 people. Immediately got a job offer, but declined since I still wanted to do a master's :)

The last one and only one I joined was online and called “flex bug squash”.
It was about ~8-9 years ago.

I won Flex Builder desktop software license and I was using it after so I think it was cool.

Fun, creative times it was.

That was also first and last significant thing I won and then Steve killed flash on mobile and as a result killed flash.

Thanks Steve if you’re reading this.

Our company often carry outs hackathons for customers and partners (for apps for our cloud system). One time they carried out an hackathon for us employees. My team won the price, a 40€ Amazon gift card 😄

Facebook world hack was my first hackathon failed miserably
but had great time with fb dev's reporting password related bug on their platform

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

Won Huawei Developer's Day

5 months old Personal phone (Huawei P30 pro) used in hackathon suddenly doesn't turn on tho.

I wish Huawei would just replace my phone with the Mate 30 pro. 🤔

If only I knew someone to attend one with

Actually any Hackathon where I'm trying to build or implement something that I (at least at the start of the Hackathon) Have no idea on how to build

Where I spend maybe half (or more) of the Hackathon on rapid prototyping and learning asap to be done in time

I get such a motivational rush that one time I even managed to stay up and productive for roughly 42 hours straight

And the knowledge that I got during that Hackathon (bash scripting) got me into server management, I even use some of my scripts daily.. so last year was a huge payoff for me 😇

Actually pretty funny that this is the question of the week, because this week I am going to a yearly Hackathon

hackathons suck.

Good day, fellow Devs.

In your workspace (like company you work for), Is it alright to sit anywhere you feel comfortable or they decide to you where you need to sit....

Right now am not understanding!!??

So, there were four judgement rounds, over a period of 36 hours.

During the 3rd judgement, the judge says we have a potentially winning project, we just need to put things together now.

During the fourth judgement round, my laptop's Network Interface Card crashes, while running Node server and ElasticSearch server (while another laptop was running a Django server)...

On top of that, the judge assumes that the probability distribution of having a chest disease that we were showing in the form of heatmap on a chest X-ray, was actually body heatmap... And we were saying wherever there is more heat, is the diseased part.

My only hackathon...

This year we went to ChaosStack with my friends. It was fine, nothing special, we sucked, but we had fun.

However, last year I applied with a different team. We had a hard time deciding the technologies to do the selection task with, as we couldn't find a language that all three of us would know. We finally agreed on C++, which wasn't exactly the best tool for the job (calling rest apis) but at least we all knew it a little. We divided the work, agreed on texting one another if we can't solve something, and I thought we were done.
Fast forward 3 days before the deadline, I text them when we could meet to connect the things.
No response.
Next morning I learned that they left to a maths camp (that's been held on those exact days for the past 10 years) and wouldn't come back until after the competition.

That’s my first hackathon, We where working for 1 full day from 4PM to 6PM next day without having any sleep to give a killer product on integration of multiple applications into one single point (Hard Work)

One team just came chill in the Hackathon went out sleep and made a killer presentation on how to integrate Slack with multiple applications like Jenkins, GutHub and much more to make life simple (Smart Work)

Actually we both lose but their way was implemented in organisation 😝

Every year a company holds a 6 hour competition for three different universities. The first year I basically showed up and sweated a lot cause I was pretty new but the next year I was in third place for the first few hours. I eventually fell behind, but it was way better. The one for this year is coming up in a couple months and I'm pretty excited.

Can't measure nothing lol