Something will definitely go wrong, and that's fine: how to win a hackathon with a team of three

What composition do you usually go to hackathons? Initially, we stated that the ideal team consists of five people - a manager, two programmers, a designer and a marketer. But the experience of our finalists showed that you can win a hackathon with a small team of three. Of the 26 teams that won the final, 3 competed and won with the musketeers. How did they succeed - read on.







We talked with the captains of all three teams and realized that their behavior strategies have much in common. The heroes of this post are the teams PLEXeT (Stavropol, nomination of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media), Composite Key (Tula, nomination of the Ministry of Informatization and Communications of the Republic of Tatarstan) and Jingu Digital (Yekaterinburg, nomination of the Ministry of Industry and Trade). For those who are interested - a brief description of the teams was hidden under cat.

Choose a task that is close to your competencies

Remember, there was such a rhyme “drama circle, circle on the photo, and I also want to sing hunting”? I think that many people are familiar with this feeling - when everything around is interesting, I want to show myself in a new way and feel for a new industry / sphere of development. The choice here depends only on the goals of your team and your willingness to take risks - can you accept your mistake if you suddenly realize in the middle of the hackathon that pulling this task out is unrealistic? Experiments from the category of "I do not rummage in mobile development, but what the hell is not joking" - an amateur. Are you the amateur?



Artyom Koshko ( ashchuk ), “Composite Key” team : “We initially planned to try something new. At the regional stage, they tried several nuget packages, to which the hands did not reach, and Yandex.Cloud. At the final, we deployed CockroachDB in Kubernetes, tried to roll migrations to it using EF Core. Something went well, something not so good. So we both learned new things, and tested ourselves, and made sure of the reliability of proven approaches . ”

How to choose a task if you run your eyes:

• Think about what competencies are needed to solve this case, and whether all team members have them
• If competencies are not enough - can you compensate for them (come up with a different solution, quickly learn new things)
• Conduct a brief overview of the market for which you will make the product
• Calculate the competition - which track / company / task most people will go to
• Answer the question: what will drive you the most?

Oleg Bakhtadze-Karnaukhov ( PLEXeT ), PLEXeT team : “We made a decision on a ten-hour transfer at the airport - just at the time of landing, a list of tracks and brief formulations of assignments fell on our mail. I immediately outlined four things that I, as a programmer, are interested in and who understand the plan of action after the start - what needs to be done and how we will do it. Then he estimated the tasks of each team member and assessed the level of competition. As a result, we chose between the tasks of Gazprom and the Ministry of Communications. Our designer’s father works with the oil and gas industry - we called him and asked questions about the industry. As a result, we realized that yes, it’s interesting, but we can’t offer something fundamentally new and we won’t be able to pull them out in terms of competencies, because there are too many industry specifics to consider. As a result, they took a chance and went to the first track. ”

Diana Ganieva ( dirilean ), Jingu Digital team: “At the regional stage, we had an assignment related to agriculture, and at the finals - AR / VR in industry. They were chosen as a team so that each person could realize their abilities. After we screened out what seemed to us not so interesting. ”

Do homework

And we are not talking about code preparation right now - doing this is generally pointless. It's about team communication. If you have not played yet, have not learned to understand each other and agree, get together a couple of times in advance and model a hackathon, or at least get in touch to talk about the main points, think out an action plan, and discuss each other's strengths and weaknesses. You can even find a case and try to solve it - at least schematically, at the level of “how to get from point A to point B”.



For this paragraph, we risk catching minuses in karma and comments, saying, how can you not understand anything, but what about the excitement, drive, the feeling that a prototype will be born from the primary broth (hello, biology lessons).



Yes, BUT.



Improvisation and drive are good only when they become only a small deviation from the strategy - otherwise the risks are too great to spend time raking up chaos and fixing mistakes, instead of working, eating or sleeping.



Oleg Bakhtadze-Karnaukhov, PLEXeT team : “I did not know any of the members of my team before the competition - I selected and invited them based on competencies and assessments at the stage of online testing. When we won the regional hackathon and realized that we still had to go to Kazan together and finish the hackathon project in Stavropol, we decided that we would get ready and train. We met twice before the finals - we found a random task and solved it. Something like a case championship. And already at this stage we saw a problem in communication and task allocation - while Polina (designer) and Lev (manager) were thinking about corporate style, product features, looking for market data, I had a lot of free time. So we realized that we need to take the nomination more difficult (I do not boast, we just mostly came across tasks related to the web, but I have to do it for one or two) and I need to get more involved in the work processes. As a result, at the final during the preliminary review I was engaged in mathematical modeling, developing algorithms. ”

Artyom Koshko, “Composite Key” team : “We were preparing more mentally, we weren’t even talking about the preparation of the code. We also distributed roles in the team in advance - we all three programmers (we have a fullstack and two backends, plus I’m a little rummaging in mobile development), but it was clear that someone would have to take on the roles of designer and manager. So unnoticed for myself, I became a team leader, I tried myself in the role of business analyst, speaker and presentation maker. I think if we hadn’t said this in advance, we wouldn’t be able to correctly allocate time, and we would not have reached the final defense. ”

Diana Ganieva, Jingu Digital: “We did not prepare for the hackathon, because we believe that hack projects should be done from scratch - that's honest. In advance, at the stage of selecting tracks, we had a common concept ready for what we want to do . ”

On some developers do not go

Diana Ganieva, Jingu Digital team : “We have three specialists in the team in different fields. In my opinion, this is the perfect composition for a hackathon. Everyone is busy with their own business and there are no intersections and tasks sharing. Another person would be superfluous. "



Statistics have shown that the average composition of our teams is from 4 to 5 people, among whom (at best) is one designer. It is generally believed that you need to strengthen the team with developers of different stripes - in order to be able to both the base and the “machine” to surprise if that. In the best case, they still take the designer with them (do not be offended, we love you!), The presentation and the interfaces themselves will not render themselves, in the end. The manager's role is neglected even more often - usually this function is taken over by the team captain, part-time developer.

And this is fundamentally wrong.



Artem Koshko, “Composite Key” team : “At some point, we regretted that we did not include a profile specialist in the team. If we were still able to cope with the design somehow, then it was difficult to deal with the business plan and other strategic things. A vivid example is when it was necessary to calculate the target audience and market size, TAM, SAM. ”



Oleg Bakhtadze-Karnaukhov, PLEXeT team : “The contribution of the developer to the product is far from 80% of the work, as is commonly believed. This is not to say that it was easier for the children - almost the entire main array of tasks lay on them. My code without interfaces, presentations, videos, strategies is just a set of characters. If there were still developers in the team instead of them, we would probably have done it, but everything would have looked less professional. Especially the presentation is generally half the success, as it seems to me. During the defense and then in real life in a couple of minutes no one will have time to understand whether your prototype really works. If you get carried away with schemes, nobody will listen to you. You go too far with the text - everyone will understand that you yourself do not know what is most important in your product, how to submit it and who needs it. ”

Time management and rest

Remember how in childhood cartoons like “Tom and Jerry,” the heroes put matches under their eyelids so they wouldn't close? Inexperienced (or too enthusiastic) hackathon participants also look approximately the same.



At the hackathon, it’s easy to lose touch with reality and a sense of time - the atmosphere offers unrestrained coding without breaks for rest, sleep, fooling around in the game room, talking with partners or attending master classes. If you treat it like a World Cup or an Olympics, then yes, maybe it's worth it to behave. Not really.



Artem Koshko, “Composite Key” team : “We had a lot of chuck-chuck, a lot - in the middle of our table a tower was built from it, it supported us fighting spirit and supported it with carbohydrates at the right time. We rested and worked together almost all the time, individually we did not rest. But they slept in different ways. Andrey (fullstack-developer) likes to sleep during the day, Denis and I like to sleep at night. Therefore, I worked more with Denis during the day, and with Andrey at night. And he slept in breaks. We didn’t have any kind of a system of work and setting tasks — rather, everything was spontaneous. But this did not bother us, because we understand and complement each other well. It helped that we are colleagues and communicate closely. I am a former intern of Andrey, and Denis came to the company as my intern. ”



And here, by the way, is that mountain of chak-chak.







Competent time management almost all the participants we interviewed called the main criterion for success at the hackathon. What does it mean? You distribute tasks so that you have time to sleep, and to eat, and tasks are performed not in a crumpled mode, but at a pace that is comfortable for each team member.





Oleg Bakhtadze-Karnaukhov, PLEXeT team : “ Our task was not to work as many hours as possible, but to remain productive as long as possible. Although we slept 3-4 hours a day, we seem to have succeeded. We could go to the games room or hang out at partners' stands, set aside normal time for food. On the second day, we tried to unload Leo as much as possible so that he would get enough sleep and manage to put himself in order before the performance. Hackathon rehearsals helped us, since we already understood how to distribute tasks, and synchronization of the daily routine - we ate, slept and awake at the same time. As a result, they worked as a single mechanism. ”



We don’t know how this team managed to drag the Eye of Agomoto to the hackathon, but in the end they even managed to shoot a video about the project and prepare a handout.

A few hackathon time management tips:

• Go from big to small - beat tasks on small blocks.
• Hackathon is a marathon. What is the most important thing in a marathon? Try to run at a uniform pace, otherwise you will fall by the end of the distance. Try to work with approximately the same intensity and not bring yourself to exhaustion.
• Think in advance what will be included in the tasks of each participant, and how much time he will spend on it. It will help to avoid surprises when it’s half an hour to the deadline, and you don’t have a big piece of work ready.
• Check the coordinates to adjust the volume of tasks. Feel that you are going well and even time is running out? Excellent - you can spend it on a dream or finalizing a presentation.
• Do not go in cycles in details, work with wide strokes.
• It’s difficult to break away from work, so specially set aside time for sleep, rest or dull. You can set alarms, for example.
• Take time to prepare and rehearse the speech. It is a must for everyone and always. We talked about this in one of the previous posts .

And there is such an alternative opinion. What option are you - torture by coding or war by war, and lunch on schedule?

Diana Ganieva, Jingu Digital team : “Every person in the team is responsible for one thing, there was no one to replace us, so we couldn’t work in shifts. When there was absolutely no strength left, they slept for three hours, depending on the amount of work that remained with the participant. There was no time to hang out from the word at all, we are not wasting precious time on this. Productivity was maintained, albeit with a short, but a dream, and goodies with tea - no energy drinks or coffee. ”

They hid several useful links under the cut, if you want to dive into the topic of time management. It will come in handy in everyday life - believe the author of this post, which is always late :)

Try to stand out

Above, we wrote about the team that made the deal to protect the project. They were so alone in their track, and we are sure that among 3500+ participants there were no more such participants.

Of course, this did not become the main reason for their victory, but an additional plus definitely brought - at least, the sympathy of the experts. You can stand out in different ways - our winners alone begin each performance with a joke that they made a bomb (Sakharov team, hello!).



We will not dwell on this in detail, but just share the PLEXeT team case - it seems to us that he is worthy to become a joke about the son of his mother’s girlfriend.



Oleg Bakhtadze-Karnaukhov, PLEXeT team: “We understood that we were ahead of schedule and decided that it would be cool to come to pre-defense with a handout. The project has a lot of technical details, explanations of the algorithms, which are completely absent from the presentation. And I want to show. Experts supported the idea and even helped to optimize. They did not even look at the first option, they said that they would never read such a canvas. We were so alone on the defenses. ”

Something will definitely go wrong, and that's fine

On the hackathon, as in ordinary life, there is always room for jambs. Even if it seems that you have foreseen everything - which of us was not late for the plane / exam / wedding simply because the cars decided to get stuck in the traffic jam, the escalator - to break down, and the passport - to forget at home?



Oleg Bakhtadze-Karnaukhov, PLEXeT team: “I made a presentation all night with Polina, but in the end they forgot to upload it to a computer in the hall where the defense took place. We are trying to open from a USB flash drive, and the antivirus perceives the file as a virus and takes it down. As a result, we managed to start everything only a minute before the end of our performance. We managed to show the video, but still very upset. A similar story happened to us on pre-defense. Our prototype did not start, the computers of Polina and Leo hung, and for some reason I left mine in the hangar where our track was sitting. And although the experts saw our work in the morning, we looked like a team of eccentrics with a handout, beautiful words, but without a product. Considering that many participants perceived my work on matmodels as “sitting at something, drawing, not looking at the computer,” the situation was not very good. ”



It will sound corny, but all you can do in this situation is exhale. It has already happened. No, you are not the only ones, everyone mows. Even if this is a fatal mistake - it’s experience. And think about it, but will the person who evaluates you consider this case a fakap?

Share in the comments what composition is more comfortable for you to work on the hackathon (both in people and in specialists) and how to build processes in a team.