Hackathons

Day 50 / 366

Hackathons are coding events where a group of people work non-stop for a set period to make a finished product. Such events are quite common in colleges and young startups. People underestimate just how much can be accomplished using these.

I did my first hackathon in the second year of my college. It was an event by Microsoft, and we had to create a web application using Microsost’s js library MSWebify. I was in a team of 4 people, and it was a 24-hour event. I was the only one on my team who stayed up for the whole thing. And it was an amazing experience. I was so zoned in on getting my app ready that I couldn’t even sleep if I wanted to.

I liked the idea so much that I started doing versions of hackathon on my own to get shit done quickly. When we used to work on freelance projects in college, we would make almost no progress during the week, and then we would stay up all night on the weekend to finish the project.

Hackathons taught me how important it is to actually build and ship products. Working in big organizations, we waste so much of time in unnecessary steps, like too many planning meetings, too much discussion, anything except actually building. But when you know that you cant sleep until you actually finish a product, you will actually finish it. Of course, it will not be a polished product, but it would be usable. You will be able to show it to people and get their feedback, and then spend time later to fix your product.