Here’s something I’d like to share with teams participating in expoinnovationchallenge.com hackathon from my past winning experience of HackaMENA.
- Build something that people love. something which is not done before.
- [Very important] don’t experiment with any new technologies, if you have not explored & mastered before. Choose technology wisely, your app don’t have to be native, user hybrid frameworks if you are master of hybrid.
- Have look at judges field of experties, they might not be technical in your field
- Build your prototype keeping winning criteria in your mind.
- Setup continuous integration Github, Bitbucket, Paas(Heroku, AWS) deploybot.io, etc don’t spend too much time here. Max 1 hour.
- Use starter kits iosstarterkit.com, hackathon-starter(node), bbootstrapzero.com
- Setup slack/hipchat or something to communicate smoothly, exchange code, etc…
- Don’t wait for backend to complete, hardcode API responses.
- Hack the challenge make innovation no need of registration pages, login etc (everybody knows it can be done anyhow)
- Build, deploy, test and build, deploy, test…. continiously.
- Make sure you eat enough to keep yourself up and running, take rest and have fun, in between.
- Polish the demo, add some bling to UI, frontend matters most vs backend. Working demo always wins over a bloated broken app.
- Prepare a killer pitch. Make First statement always interactive in pitch or maybe a joke, or a question to crowd -Be attention seeker.
- Write the script and practise the demo with a TIMER.