Participated in my first ever Hackathon this weekend (5/17/2014), what an experience that was! The idea behind this Hackathon was to give hackers a chance to make government more efficient and transparent. Colorado and Wyoming worked with Google and Galvanize down in Denver to put the event on, and I went down with four other developers from ETS to compete. We didn't win but we learned a lot and booked some serious overtime haha.
A few of the things I learned at this Hackathon:
Using Git effectively requires discipline. We fought with it all night long, and while we cursed it last night, I'm really pretty surch the cause of most of our Git hell problems was how we were using it, not so much Git itself.
A Hackathon is a great place to learn, but if you are learning the basic infrastructure stuff (like Web API and Angular), you aren't going to have much time to learn and/or implement the stuff that the hackathon is focused on. Had we gotten the basics out of the way faster, maybe we could have played with more of the Google APIs they wanted us looking at.
You can make a really awesome app in 24 hours if you know what you are doing. Some of the submissions were really sharp and functional, and used technology like heatmaps and geofencing on Google Maps, Tesseract OCR, QR and Barcode readers, SMS alerts, realtime saving... some really cool stuff.
Staying up all night is easy when you are excited about what you are doing, but you'll pass out on the bus ride home, haha.
I had a great time, and it is definitely something that every developer should do at least once in their career.
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