How To Win A Hackathon
By: Rick Vink
Tags: Sustainability, Hackathons, Hacking, Odysseyhack, Odyssey

How To Win A Hackathon

3D rendering of the trophy we won

Hackathons are filled with people who are good at programming and designing. It’s very tempting to start coding right away, however this might not be the best strategy if you are in it to win it.

What is a Hackathon?

The concept of a hackathon is to create (hack) something in a short amount of time. Most of these hackathons include programming in some sort or form. There are many different flavors of hackathons and this is very important to keep in mind if you want to rank high.

I distinguish hackathons in two main types. One with a theme where it’s all about creativity — like a game development hackathon — and the other kind is focussed a some very specific goal. The latter is the case for the hackathon we attended.

Are there still hackathons with the corona virus lurking? Good question. The hackathon has been postponed multiple times due to corona so the organisation decided to host the event online in a virtual environment. This meant that everybody worked from the comfort of their own bed… I mean home.

The Theme of the Hackathon

The Hackathon (Odyssey) we attended was all about creating solutions for a social/environmental problem in the world. Something they did really well is inviting stakeholders who are very knowledgeable about the problems. This resulted in an inspirational environment to generate ideas that are actually realistic instead of just something fun.

Photo: Grabing plastic on a beach. Source: from the odyssey website

The challenge we were faced with was creating a solution that promotes reducing plastic pollution in the world in a practical way. To put that in their own words:

Our oceans contain an estimated 86 million metric tons of plastic comprised of five trillion individual items. The tracking and re-use of this plastic for upcycled packaging is growing, with initiatives including Dell’s Next Wave, VMware’s blockchain and DAML to track plastics origins. Communities and individuals risk injury when sourcing the plastic, and corporations fear being held accountable for investing in child labour, as the communities cannot prove who sourced the plastic. Social aspects are the key challenge to the current process. Source

Our team

Right of the bat we had a good start because we had a great composition of people with different complementary traits in our team. A mixture of people who are great at presenting, programming frontend, programming backend and managing servers. Our team consisted of myself from School of Data Science and people from Circularise.

For some background about us (with a pinch of shameless advertising): School of Data Science is teaching skills in the fields of Data Science, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing and programming in general. The company Circularise is working on a Blockchain solution for transparency and traceability for a circular economy.

Our strategy

The goal of the hackathon was to create a solution for a problem. I repeat: The goal of the hackathon was to create a solution for a problem. Not the most functions in a prototype, not the best code and not even the best presentation. It’s all about the best idea and everything we do besides forming our idea is to help present that idea to the judges.

This might be a bit frustrating for people who love to program or design because you ideally spend a large chunk of your time talking. Almost everything we coded before we derived to our final idea ended up in the bin. This is exactly what I envisioned before entering this hackathon so I didn’t even code one line up till this point.

You also see that some teams start well in advance of the hackathon. This might actually be counter effective. It’s all about listening to the stakeholders and letting go of your ego, because the chances are high that you don’t know the best solution before talking with the stakeholders. If you already did a lot of work before the hackathon started you might be tempted to hold onto your idea instead of accepting the sunk cost. That being said, a couple of our team members already did a brainstorm session before the hackathon to get a first rough idea of a solution.

Phase 1: Deriving to our idea

Image by xresch at Pixabay

We spend the first 40% of the 48 hours iterating on our idea. The goal of this phase is to: first get a lot of different ideas on the table, followed by filtering and fine tuning them. The process looked something like this:

understanding the problem thinking of an idea talking about our idea to stakeholders radically changing the idea talking about our idea to stakeholders altering the idea talking about the idea to stakeholders finetuning the idea talking about the idea to stakeholders finetuning the idea

This process was managed by using a shared board (we used miro) in which we could all write down our ideas and discord (because of corona). We closed this phase by creating a mockup of the prototype and discussed it in detail until we all agreed to it.

There are multiple benefits of spending so much time in this phase:

Obtaining a better suited idea to the problem.

Getting to know the questions of the stakeholders/judges.

The stakeholders/judges already know you and your idea before the presentation.

Less mentally draining than coding something that will be tossed out of the window.

Phase 2: Creating the prototype

Image from Austrian National Library

Before going into the hackathon we had the original idea to have one front-end developer, two backend developers (including me) and one person that maintains the project. However, the prototype we made actually required two frontend applications for the presentation so I worked on the front-end aswell instead. The other two people of our team started preparing the presentation.

It probably helped a lot that we are all quite experienced in programming; at the point that it just feels like executing instead of trying to figure out how to program something. Of course, we still had our struggles during some parts of the code but all by all it went quite smooth. This whole part took us about 50% of the total time.

Phase 3: Finalizing

The last 10% of our time was spent on integrading our codes together and incorporating it into one story for the presentation. We started this process a couple of hours before the end of the hackathon so it didn’t feel rushed.

The presentation

The presentation went great. It really showed that we talked a lot with the stakeholders because we knew about the questions the jury might have. The answers to these questions were incorporated into the presentation or, at least, we had an answer ready.

The time we spent on programming ended up being 2 minutes of material for the 19 minutes presentation (including question time). You might ask: is it even worth programming? Well yes! It’s extremely powerful to showcase your idea with functional code instead of just some copy pasted visuals in a presentation. Additionally, it makes your team look more professional.

Our result

Image of our product wasteparty

For the people who are interested in our idea: Wasteparty is a system in which we promote transparency end-to-end. People who gather plastics are rewarded by adding transparancy and environmentaly friendly practices. This should reduce exploitation such as childlabor. Companies can therefore buy renewable plastics with a lower chance of getting backlash resulting in damage to their brand. Additionally we introduce a system in which companies can invest money locally to promote more ethically sourced plastics.

If you want to know more about Wasteparty, you can send me a message or get into contact with the people of Circularise.

Take aways

The last thing you want after an intense hackathon is to have your idea being smacked down with a few small questions by the judges. So spend most of your time obtaining a knowledge of the stakeholders. Everything else you do should be focussed on enhancing the presentation of your idea.

If you are going to join a hackathon which has no specific goal — like a game development hackathon — than it’s probably totally different. But I still hope you found this article useful or interesting in some way…

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