For those who don’t know already, hackathons are programming events that last anywhere from 24 hours to one week. The purpose of a hackathon is a for a group of programmers to work together on a collaborative project. Most hackathons are competitions where several teams are competing to create prototypes that innovate on a theme or improve upon an existing project. A hackathon has plenty of benefits, which I plan to discuss below.
Some questions I would like to expain about are –
1) Why should you participate in hackathons ?
2) When you should not participate in hackathons ?
Why should you participate in hackathons?
Well there are various benefits associated with it such as
1) You get to learn new tools , frameworks , programming language, and various different tech’s within a limited time.
If prizes are of high value then you are forcing yourself, obviously, to learn, build and submit your project according to theme and requirement of hackathon.
Benefits – New learnings , Projects
Your thinking expands in the sense that how can you yourself convert your ideas into life. You come up with new and amazing ideas.
Also most of the hackathons require idea submission , pitching an idea.
So now you have to learn how to pitch an idea or how to explain your ideas to other by building a presentation or pdf file.
Benefits – New Ideas , Pitch an Idea
3) If you are working alone on a project , you can invite other participants to work as a team or you can join other’s team. in this way , you will get to know how difference between working alone and working with a team.
If you are part of team highly experienced , then you are very lucky. You will learn how to structure your ideas and implement them smoothly.
Benefits – Working in a team
4) If you win any hackathon , then apart from prize you get recognition and you might get an opportunity to work with the same company that organised it. You will expand your networks with other amazing developers.
Benefits – Recognition , Opportunity , Build Netwrok
When should you not participate?
Well , participating in hackathons specifically has no disadvantage but when to participate makes sense.
Suppose you are learning new programming langugae or anything else , and you are in middle of it , then even if you participate in hackathon then do not leave what you are currently learning for sake of hackathon because once you left it for few days that would be just left behind.
Well its from my personal experience that, once i started to learn a new framework for app development and due to hackathon I left it, than after 6 months I again have to start from the beginning what I have started previously.
