A few weeks ago I went to my first Hackathon, Hack Tennessee 7. Aside from writing code, I had no idea what to expect before getting there. On Friday night I arrived at Track One, where electronic dance music was emanating from the warehouse. During check-in, they gave everyone a bunch of free stuff including a t-shirt, a water bottle and a little bluetooth speaker. There were about 750 makers, hackers and designers participating in the event. What’s incredible is that the organizers were able to find sponsors who were willing to pay the big bucks to feed that many people and keep them stocked with Red Bull and snacks for the whole weekend. There was a lot of energy at the event. It was really awesome, and it makes me wish I would have planned to stay the whole time.
The project I worked on, called “Take Charge,” was an app to help people identify their responsibilities and make a plan to take care of them. David, a member of my team, had the great idea that our responsibilities come from the roles we have. In the app, we wanted to provide suggestions to the user based on which of the roles they said they fit. The other main idea for the project, which I got from Dave Ramsey’s book EntreLeadership, was that we can rank responsibilities in terms of how important and how urgent they are. We’d ask users to rank their responsibilities then recommend how to take charge of them.
We came close, but unfortunately we didn’t finish the app. Here are some of the lessons I learned from this experience:
Develop team members over code.
• The product of the team lead is the team itself.
• The codebase is an indicator of how good the team is.
• It means helping team members find opportunities to match their strengths.
• It may include establishing a toolset and workflow that works on their machine.
Be realistic.
• The goal is to get the project done in the amount of time you have.
• Don’t spend much time planning—you’ll lose time and focus.
• Don’t assume you’re going to be awake 48 hours and still be sharp enough to solve problems.
