1st Time to Join a Hackathon : Lessons Learned

I recently joined a 1-day Hackathon and we were two on the team. There are lots of lessons learned. I will also place comments in italics on how we are doing on every items.

1. Make sure majority of the tools are installed on your PC. Or, at least, the installers should be on your PC. Downloading the installers and installing them will eat some precious time. We are very prepared when we came to the venue.
2. The moment the organizers give the Challenge Statement, brainstorm. Refrain from doing any coding. As I have project management background, we were able to come up with a good game plan and a solution to the Problem Statement.
3.  Make sure you are familiar with Git. You don't have to be an expert in Git. You must at least know how to clone, push, pull, and commit. If you are new to Git, use a UI tool like TortoiseGit.
4. Work incrementally. Whenever you have a working code, ALWAYS COMMIT TO GIT! That means having more than 3 commits per hour.
5. Take frequent short breaks. As I am the sole developer, I need this because of the stress on the time limit.
6. Respect the developer's time. When I was coding and debugging something, my partner keeps on giving suggestions that is not on the context of the problem we are currently solving; therefore, I wasn't able to absorb a thing he is saying since I am focused on doing something.
7.  Try not to panic when something is wrong. On my case, I did panic at around 3:45PM. I though my software is not working, but when i figured out, the online JSON viewer is showing me the JSON on a wrong way. The data was represented like this: Data1,Info1,Data2,Info2. Due to the constant pressure, I missed that and I thought it was Info1,Data1,Info2,Data2. Try to take note of the details of the datasets in case you are working on Open Data.
8. There will be different kinds of people on the venue. Remember the panic that I had on the previous item? When I was dealing with it, some of the people on the other team are celebrating on how good their system was. I panicked crazily. If you are like me, make sure to bring headphones and listen to some MP3 songs. This will help you avoid hearing other people and avoid more panic.
9. After you are done, make sure to talk to some other teams and be friendly. If you ask questions on what they did, they will most of the time give you an overview on what they did and you will see how proud they are of their work. You will also learn from them.
10. Enjoy the foods!

I think we did pretty good on the Hackathon. We were able to "WOW" the audiences. However, there is one thing that we missed:

YOU NEED TO KNOW THE SPONSORS AND THEIR NEEDS.

The main sponsor of the Hackathon are doing web apps. And we did a mobile app. All the winners created websites. No mobile apps won on that hackathon. If you would like to win, create a solution AND use a technology that would be inline with their business needs as much as possible.

After that Hackathon, I was too tired. Although it was a good experience. Now, I know what to expect on our next Hackathon.