What are Hackathons?

Hackathons are events put together to bring the coding community together. In other words, the hackers all over the world create teams and work on several challenges, it may be to innovate on a theme or improve upon an existing project. Hackathons aren't just meant for competitions but they involve collaboration too.

Hackathons aren't just for coders

Yes, you heard it right! Hackathon doesn't mean that only the programmers are allowed to participate. Of course, I won't deny the fact that it involves coding challenges, but on the same line, there are so many non-coding challenges too, which every beginner can complete.
And even if you don't know the "C" of "Coding", you will learn a lot of skills by collaborating on projects, building team and helping the team members.

Now, let's talk about one of the most popular student hackathon league. Yes, you guessed it right! It's the Major League Hacking(MLH).
MLH hosts a lot of hackathons, every season with different themes and competitions that inspire innovation, cultivate communities and teach Computer Science skills to a large number of students all over the world.

One of the series of hackathons by MLH that I know of are:

• Local Hack Day: Learn
• Local Hack Day: Build
• Local Hack Day: Share

My introduction to "Hackathon"

Now, let me tell you about my journey of how started participating in Hackathons.
So, all this started in January 2021, when I joined the awesome Open Source community, EddieHub by Eddie Jaoude. This community is awesome which believes in Collaboration first, code second. If you want to join this too, just click on the link I have mentioned.

After being introduced to the community and beginning my journey to Open Source, I got notified about Local Hack Day: Build hackathon by MLH through one of the channels in the EddieHub's server. All the community members decided to participate in it which was from the second week of January 2021. And yes we did it, with lots of collaboration, guild meet-ups(for those of you who don't know about guild, it's a team formed during hackathons hosted by MLH) and spending our sleepless nights completing challenges, we made it to the top of the leaderboard.

Again, we participated in Local Hack Day: Share but due to lots of competition, we couldn't made it to #1 but yeah we were among the top guilds.

Now, I hope you have gotten the notion of what hackathon brings to you.

My Plans for 2022 Hackathon Season

Now, let's get to the point and let me tell you about my plans for the 2022 Hackathon Season.
So, we EddieHubbers are already participating in MLH: INIT 2022 and it's lot more exciting completing challenges such as:

• Recreating a famous painting on MS Paint (Oh! That reminds me of my childhood.)
• Create a Comic about Tech
• Cup stacking (Sounds interesting, right?)
• !Light

Now, you must agree with me that hackathons don't just involve coding challenges but there are non-coding, fun parts too.
So, I have already registered for most of the 2022 Hackathons. If you want too, go and get yourself registered here.

As I already mentioned about my participation in hackathons and what they bring with them for us, I would like to highlight some important skills which I developed participating in it and I hope to learn and grow my skillset even further by participating in them.

• Will learn what we don't know.
• Will grow as a developer.
• Getting introduced to the tech world
• Developing problem solving skills
• Build awesome projects
• Making connections
• Collaboration
• Time management skills
• Teamwork

And of course Fun!
So, this was all from my side. Please do share your experience of participating in Hackathons in the comments section too. I would be happy to read them all.
Happy Hacking!!! ✌

PS:

1. Some of the projects I built participating in these hackathons are here.

2. Here are some of my tweets of hackathons I participated in: