Last weekend, I went to Munich with some friends for a hackathon organized by the CDTM. It was my first “real” hackathon weekend experience, because all the previous competitions I did typically lasted 10-15 days.

We were lucky to be selected as part of the 125 participants out of 500+ applicants, and it was such a great weekend. It was also an emotional rollercoaster: we had so many highs and lows, some moments of doubts, and many moments of pure joy.

In this post I’ll try to recap what it was like, hopefully without writing too much.

The Start

Three of us had to take a flight early in the morning from Madrid, so we didn’t get much sleep. The hackathon check-in was from 4 to 6pm, so we went there after 5pm. It was a mistake, because we found that all the private spaces/rooms were reserved by the other participants. Luckily, we found a meeting room with four seats, which was completely empty, because we think that people assumed that it wasn’t part of the available space.

There were 3 main cases that we had to rank by order of preference. We didn’t have enough time to think it through, and we ended up not liking the case that we put as our first choice. It was 10:30pm, and we were trying to find another team to switch with us, with no luck. After a few hours, we stopped trying to switch with another case, and started thinking about our idea. At around 2 or 3am, we had the idea down, so we decided to get some sleep during the first night, and to start executing right after waking up.

After waking up

Instead of immediately executing like we decided in the night, we started doubting our idea again. Once again, we kept looking for teams to swap with, but ofc it was impossible at that point because some teams had already finished building their prototypes. During lunch, we decided that we would stop trying to swap with other teams, and that we would just stick to our case. We now had to find an idea to build.

After a few hours of debating, we completed the full circle, and went back to our original idea. We had to start coding asap. We were so disorganized that we didn’t even have a shared repository; each one of us was (vibe) coding on their own, without even a clear separation of tasks. At 5pm, one mate had to go for a couple of hours for a meeting, so I tried running his code locally, and it wasn’t working. I rewrote his chatbot to integrate it in my own repo, but progress felt super slow.

The depression

The other teams were wrapping up their projects, when we still didn’t have anything yet. We wasted the first 24 hours of the hackathon doing essentially nothing. This was so depressing that we seriously thought about giving up, not submitting anything, and simply doing tourism and enjoying our last day in Munich.

But then, our teammate comes back, more motivated than ever. Slowly, his motivation starts spreading to the rest of us, and we start shipping feature after feature, all in the same shared repo. We started making progress, and our idea was finally taking shape, 12 hours before the deadline. At the rate we were going at, we even started thinking that we would have a shot at winning. But then, it hits us: we get stuck on a bug. We couldn’t simply ignore this feature, because it was critical for our prototype.

The final sprint

We try for several hours, with no results. It was now 4am, and we were all exhausted, barely awake. Again, we were seriously thinking of giving up and going to sleep. At this moment, I decide that I would try one more thing, and we agreed to stop if it didn’t work.

It worked.

As soon as we saw that it worked, we all immediately woke up: instant turbo caffeine shot. We continue working and finish our prototype at 7am. The deadline was at 10, so we decided to record our pitch/demo video. We submitted at 8, and went to sleep right until the final ceremony.

The closing

We knew that what we did wasn’t very good, because we did it in one-third of the time we were supposed to have. However, we unexpectedly won one of the five challenges (side quests) proposed. It came as a complete surprise, and we were so happy. We each got a flipper zero, which I’m so excited to tinker with.

If we managed to win something we built in 12 hours only, imagine what we could have done if we actually started building from the beginning, for the full 36 hours. This was what I was thinking at that moment, but I still don’t regret anything, because we had so much fun during the weekend. We probably laughed more than all the other teams combined. I also learned so many things.

My takeaways

The experience was amazing, and I wouldn’t want to do it any differently. But here are some things I learned:

  1. Execution is far more valuable than ideation: We spent 24 hours debating our idea just to end up going back to the one we had in the first night. If we had just started coding sooner, we probably would have built something better. We also would have understood the problem more deeply, which could have allowed us to potentially pivot into an even better direction.
  2. Split the work and trust each other: We initially were super disorganized, which cost us a lot of time. For the next hackathon, we will make sure to split the project into different tasks from the beginning, and assign them based on each member’s strengths and weaknesses.
  3. Believe in yourself: Initially, we thought we had no chance to win, because a lot of the other participants were Master’s students, and some even PhD, so there was no way we would have a technical edge over them. After seeing the final pitches of the other teams, and even winning a challenge, we realized that what we built wasn’t as bad as we thought, and that we could have done something even better. For my next hackathon, I will go in with more confidence, because I know that I am capable of winning.

Huge shout-out to my teammates. I’m super grateful to all the organizers and everyone else involved in making this experience possible for us.

Also, I’m especially grateful to Mehmet the boss (if you’re reading this, you’re the best man fr, thanks for everything!).