My First Hackathon

Hi guys, I’m Keke, one of the organizers on the Hack Western organizing team. My first hackathon was last year so I am sharing my experiences as a first-time hacker. If you are thinking of attending your first hackathon, this is the blog post for you!

Attending Hack Western 6 for the first time in 2019, I found a “come as you are with what you have” mindset. I felt welcome and supported even as a first-time hacker. There is an incredibly diverse group of people that attend every hackathon, and there is something for everyone. At Hack Western, there are projects to be demoed, prizes to be won, technical and non-technical workshops to attend, and companies, recruiters and other hackers to connect with!

My experience

The idea of attending a hackathon can be intimidating.

I remember walking in, thinking I didn’t know enough to build anything. However, I still wanted to come out on the other side with having learned or won something. I also heard that hackathons were a great way to learn how to network and speak with industry professionals. Likewise, I wanted to use the opportunity to talk to different recruiters.

What I built

I went into the hackathon with two of my friends from high school. We built a personal finance assistant that kept track of purchases, account balances and could answer basic finance questions. It was a project using google’s dialogue flow supported by a firebase database. If asked about it in an interview I would say, “I learned how NLP combines linguistic anthropology with technological tools.” But really, the tools were very straightforward. It was mostly inputting answers to basic finance questions into dialogue flow and using javascript to get the program to do simple math to calculate account balances.

When it came to the presentation, because Western’s secure wireless network doesn’t support smart home products, the Google home couldn’t be used for the demo. So, we presented a voiceless demo of a voice hack with text interactions that judges had to read off the google assistant app.

During the hackathon, I also took breaks to attend workshops and stop at some of the sponsorship booths. The recruiters I met at the hackathon ended up being very helpful during the application process!

Talking to sponsors and recruiters

This year, because everything is virtual, sponsors will have their own meeting rooms on zoom and will be easily accessible. On top of asking them questions about their company, do not be afraid of telling them about yourself. Tell them why you are at the hackathon, why you love tech, what you are building, what you like to do- they want to get to meet you!

In the end…

Our hack didn’t win any prizes. But, I still won AirPods from participating in a social media contest. If you take away one thing from my experience, it’s that there are many parts of a hackathon to participate in, and you never know who you could meet and what you might win as a result.

Coming from someone who had a GREAT time at her first hackathon, here is my quick guide to thriving at your first virtual hackathon:

Coming soon