Hi everyone 👋

Recently I've participated on the #Hack20, the 2020 annual Flutter hackathon.
That was the first time that I was participating to a hackathon, and almost one of the first time I was making a tech event. So I though 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 thing 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 really 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 bLoC pattern for state management on the hackathon and we all learn a little bit on 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 really 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 really crazy, and made by a diversity of awesome great developers !
I've been really impressed by some of the projects and it 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 totally get why people get excited about, but in my opinion, it's really not a reason of why you should participate !

Participating to the hackathon is more like playing a new World of Warcraft expansions with friends, you start playing in the morning and you're going 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 if you take pleasure to code with Flutter, then programming is a real game.

See you for #Hack21.