tl,dr; making it to the finals was an emotional rollercoaster, but totally worth it.
Foreword: I can’t possibly describe what an amazing experience it was even using my native language (Portuguese), but I’m naive enough to try it with my Tarzan English - lets not get distracted by that, if the text bother you enough I will gladly accept a pull request.
I’m 43 and yes, by our industry standards I'm an old fart. I've been doing this since when the typical server used to have less RAM than the phone you have in your pocket. Last weekend I went to my first hackathon: Masters of Code São Paulo, hosted by MasterCard. I went alone, teamed with a brilliant young guy there and our project made into the 6 final competitors against larger teams. These are my takeaways:
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Bring lots of hardware: I brought my lighter laptop and my teammate Eduardo Wada brought nothing, so we had to share my Samsung series 9. Next time I will pack a bigger laptop, another one for backup and one or two monitors, trackpad and mechanical keyboard. I was very envious of other teams that did this. On the positive side, I discovered pair programing can be very effective when you are paired with someone smart like Eduardo.
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A small team with focus can accomplish a lot: we delivered a fully working application and a good looking one considering we had no designer on our team. All other finalists were bigger teams with 4 or 5 members. Truth is we started with 5 people, but after a long brainstorming session It was clear for me that we would not be able to reconcile our visions, so I decided to leave and Eduardo joined me. In the end we celebrated our decision - two guys left the competition, and other made a hilarious pitch without a demo (it was a PPT-free competition with mandatory product demo) and received a big nerf gun as consolation gift when he said he was abandoned by his teammates. Which leads us to the last lesson:
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Work your pitching. At the first pitch we had two minutes to demo our idea and one minute for questions. When the staff said they had no adapter for the micro-dvi output of the series 9, I went very nervous. We were told to bring the laptop to the judges table and demo our project there. We had to improvise a bit, but when the judges smiled saying they had no questions I felt we could have a place in the finals - but I totally failed to prepare for that. We were the first team to be called on stage for the final pitch, and I panicked. In the last second we borrowed a laptop but when the clock started, I looked back and the app was not in the screen yet so I forgot everything we rehearsed before and totally screwed up (sorry for that, Eduardo).
I would like to thank Eduardo for the partnership, Mastercard for hosting the event and everybody else I met there for being such a merry crowd.
I have never felt so alive since when I heard my daughter cry for the first time (another great weekend).