Hi, this weekend my friends and I took part in Media Hack Weekend hackathon. And we … Failed. Here I’d like to provide a few advices on how to achieve such glorious result.

First of all do not prepare yourself. Gather the team right before the hackathon: you will 100% find all guys you need. Especially the UI/UX specialist.

Secondly, do not even try to prepare the idea. Come to the competition bare-minded, find out the idea 5 min before your pitch and make slides from random pics. Do not forget to include totally unrelated cat pictures in your slides.

After that spend about 6 hours arguing about technology stack and roles. After you came to some agreement, forget about it and let anyone do everything he/she wants.

By the way, never explore the capabilities of technologies. NEVER! I’ll explain that later.

Did I mention about not scaffolding your project before the hackathon? It is so interesting to spend next 6 hours searching and setting up a template project for chosen technology stack.

Hey, here you have something up and running. What to do next? Start one more argue about correct architecture, CI. Then spend time on integrating some codestyle checks, noone will pay attention at.

Do not sleep at all. The more you sleep, the less you code. It does not matter how effective you are. Just do not sleep!

After seeing how ineffective you are, keep going hoping you will overcome this. After finding out your tech stack is uncapable doing what you want do not change it – you’ve spent so much time on it to throw it away. Even if you did totally nothing useful.

When your team does their bests to complete the project, just give up and leave them when they need you the most till the end. Make them feel disastrous and betrayed.

If you do a web project always do perfect architecture and backend, postpone such unnecessary things as UI/UX, frontend till the end. Noone is interested in good UI, everything the jury cares about is your perfect RESTful backend. Of course everybody uses curl and everybody prefers terminal to their favorite Google Chrome/Firefox/Safari.

Never do the simple things. Your code must be full of interchangeable abstraction layers with universal interfaces and so on and so forth. It doesn’t matter that you’ll need a month to implement your idea in that way. Do not even try to do simple one-time things simple – you will never abandon your proect and thousands of other developers will need it for their own purposes.

Follow these simple steps and you’ll definitely fail any hackathon for the Satan’s sake! Good luck and happy hacking!