The secret sauce for successful hackathon experience

I summed up my rich hackathon experience and prepared a guide on how to successfully participate in hackathons. In this blog post, you will find advice on what to focus on before and during an event, how to organize the work process, and more.

My hackathon journey

I really love hackathons! My first hackathon happened in 2016 (Garage 48 Open & Big Data) when I just started my Master’s at Tartu University. Since then, I have participated in 10+ hackathons and won quite a lot of awards and I’ve mentored at 5+ hackathons. Now 5 years later, I can say that I mastered it! Through all those events, I found out how not only to enjoy the process but also achieve nice results.

If you want to get the most out of a hackathon, I compiled a guide for you: read carefully and think about how you can use it during your next event.

Disclaimer: The focus of my blog post is on the type of hackathons where you need to hack and get (at least almost) a working prototype in the end. There exist other types of events, for example, ideation ‘-thons’ — their goal is just to brainstorm some idea and present it verbally. They are more “soft”, but in this blog post, I concentrate on hardcore part of hacking.