Hi everyone 👋

Recently I've participated in the #Hack20, the 2020 annual Flutter hackathon. That was the first time that I was participating in a hackathon, and almost one of the first times I was making a tech event. So I thought that I'll share my (very little) experience and some tips with you today!

Making a team

You're going to spend the next 24/48 hours making code! So an important thing is to participate as a team: if you're doing it alone, you'll probably lose motivation quickly and you'll not push yourself to learn new things on the road. As an example, my team was composed of 3 developers (including me), we didn't know each other before making our team, we were simply 3 people speaking the same language in the #searching-a-team channel on Slack. Turning out that we were all living on different continents! And It was especially cool to discover new Flutter developers with different habits of coding!

Learning new things

With a team of random people, I discovered a LOT of new packages and a lot of new habits of code! For example, I was always using the package Provider for state management in my Flutter projects, but we choose to use the bLoC pattern for state management on the hackathon and we all learn a little bit about this new way for us to deal with state management! We also share a lot of tips and answer each other with the bit of knowledge we had on Flutter, it was truly team play at his best!

After submitting our project, we've got an overview of all the projects that were submitted and some ideas were extraordinarily crazy, and made by a diversity of awesome great developers! I've been impressed by some of the projects and they gave me a lot of inspiration and motivation for future personal projects.

Don't participate to win.

I've seen a lot of people participating for the cash prize, which was a crazy amount of 4.000$ this year for the first place, and more than 20.000$ in total. And I get why people get excited about it, but in my opinion, it's not a reason why you should participate!

Participating in the hackathon is more like playing a new World of Warcraft expansions with friends, you start playing in the morning and you're going to bed late, and during all this time on your computer:

• You're happy to spend time with your mates.
• You learn new things.
• You discover things that you'll not have searched by yourself.
• Share a unique experience.

It's maybe confusing to compare it to a game but programming is a real game if you take pleasure to code.

See you for #Hack21.