On July 11th I spent the day at BloomKnights, the BA1 Hack Day put on by Knight Hacks at the University of Central Florida, and walked out with second place overall.
One-day hackathons are a different sport than weekend ones. There is no time to be clever about architecture and no time to recover from a bad idea, so the whole event compresses into a single question: what can you actually finish?
What we built
[One or two sentences on the project: the idea, who it was for, and the stack.]
What worked
Scoping down, early and hard. [Replace with the concrete cut you made — the feature you dropped in hour two that made the rest possible.]
Building the demo path first. The thing being judged is not the codebase, it is the two minutes you spend showing it. Working backward from the demo meant every hour went into something the judges would actually see.
[Third thing that worked.]
What I would do differently
[The honest one — the hour you lost to something avoidable, or the piece you should have faked instead of building properly.]
Worth the day
Second overall is a good result and I will take it, but the part I keep thinking about is how much the constraint helped. Given a month, we would have built something more ambitious and probably worse. Given eight hours, we built one thing that worked.
Thanks to Knight Hacks for running it, and to my teammates for [the specific thing they carried].