Intro to Hackathons

What’s a hackathon? Tips and lots of tools for how to rock your first hackathon.

Transcript

1. INTRO TO HACKATHONS: How to Rock a Hackathon Like a Boss Girl Develop It - Portland
2. GDI Portland Hackathon 2015 Sunday, April 12, 2015 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM Art Institute of Portland 1122 NW Davis St, Portland, OR *** lots of prizes ***
3. Why Hackathon? • Learn and build something • Meet new people • Make connections • Potential new work opportunities • WIN!!!
4. Prep
5. • An idea • Enthusiasm • “Getting things done” mentality • A laptop that’s ready to go What to Bring?
6. Laptop • Text Editor: Sublime, Brackets, etc • Version Control: Github, Bitbucket • File Sharing: Dropbox, Google Drive, etc • Web Hosting: Heroku
7. More Tools Cools APIs to easily add functionality to you app: • Twilio: call or text a phone number from your app • SendGrid: send an email out to users • Rdio: add a music player • Box: store files dynamically
8. More Tools - Wireframing and Prototyping • Wireframing: Balsamiq, Moqups, Flinto, InVision, etc • Prototyping: Sketch, Photoshop, InVision ***you can try these with a 14 or 30-day free trial
9. More Tools - Design • Inspiration: UX Archive • HTML templates: HTML5UP • HTML/CSS Frameworks: Twitter Bootstrap, Zurb Foundation • Fonts: Google Fonts, Font Awesome (icons) • Stock Photos: Unsplash, 1001FreeDownloads
10. APIs • Practice beforehand: http://www.codecademy.com/ learn • Know how to make API calls, parse a JSON object, and output the data
11. At the Hackathon
12. How to Select a Team • Pick an idea that you believe you, a problem that you’re having right now • Ask what technology a team plans to use
13. How Many Per Team? • More isn’t necessarily better • 3-4 for a short hackathon like Sunday’s • Incorporate those wanting to learn programming through pair programming
14. Managing Time • Find an idea fast • Come up with one main use case • Come up with secondary use cases in case you have time • Work on the presentation as you’re building your app, at least two hours before you have to present • must have something to a demo • practice the presentation
15. The Presentation
16. A Winning Presentation • State the problem you’re trying to solve - tell a story! • Your solution • Technology you used • Tech problems you encountered and how you solved them • DEMO!!!
17. Pro Tips • State your team number + name • Introduce team members • Have everyone on your team present • Brand your app with a name + logo and make sure it’s visible throughout the presentation • PRACTICE!!!
18. Demo • The demo is the most important part of the hackathon • Someone on your team should work on the presentation + demo at least two hours before it’s time to present
19. Thank you!
20. Caterina Paun @caterinasworld
21. Good luck on Sunday!