Imagine you and a bunch of your friends are sitting together for the weekend and all of you decide to make an app. Be it a web, mobile or desktop app. How cool does that sound?
If it indeed sounded cool and fun to you then Hackathons are for you. A hackathon is a fun event that generally stretches over a short time period (mostly weekends) where you, solo or accompanied by your team (team sizes are generally discussed by the managing authority) get together and work on implementing an idea and turning that into an application which might even grow to be a brilliant startup someday 🤩.
The best part about these hackathons is that you don't have to be an expert to get started. Yes, you read that right. Beginners who are starting out with coding can get hands-on experience in implementing and applying their programming skills to make a working application and when you do get stuck, all you need to do is ask. Ask the organizing staff for help and they will help you with queries that you might have.
Personally, I always had a fear of getting started with hackathons because I thought that I'd have to gain a certain level of expertise before participating in one but after getting started, I realized that I was actually misguided. If you think that any particular hackathon seems like a fun event then you really should trust your instincts and go for it (A funny anecdote: Back when I was a freshman, I thought that hackathons were meant for literally hacking a system).
Community is a big part of hackathons. Different groups of people sit together and collaborate on ideas. Different people might have different ideas that might then give birth to an amazing group project. You get to learn a lot from others' experiences and you get to implement your knowledge and ideas first-hand (guess that solves the issue of the job-experience paradox). Besides learning from others and working together, you also get to meet cool people and make new friends 🔥. Plus, a bunch of hackathons also offer good food (if you're attending in-person) and fun swag. Imagine getting good food, and nice swag and you get to sit with your friends and have a fun brainstorming sesh. Sounds like the complete deal tbh.
I started out with MLH (Major League Hacking) and I recommend you to do so too. It's a community that empowers hackers from all over the world to get together virtually and participate in hackathons. They have multiple hackathons running throughout the week with one every weekend. They also have hackathons associated with various universities around the world.
You'll always get an event to collaborate on. If you ever feel like you want to go solo for a hackathon, you're most welcome to do so. The scope of projects isn't just limited to software. I've seen teams collaborate on hardware projects too and then publish their results with pictures of their projects.
The team behind MLH is super helpful. They were really eager to solve whatever questions I had. Here is the link to their discord community. Join the server and take some time familiarizing yourself with all the different channels and be sure to post your questions in the "#help" channels. They also have a channel where you can approach other members for collaborations with them on any upcoming hackathons. If you wanted to, you could even organize your own hackathon with help from MLH.
MLH also has its own internship program called the MLH Fellowship program which runs for 12 weeks. Here you get to work on either Open-source software or as a Software engineer or a Production engineer during the fellowship program. You get a stipend depending on your location and plenty of work experience to showcase on your resume ✨.
Since I didn't really know anyone, I introduced myself in the collab channel and soon had people messaging me, asking to collaborate on hackathons. This actually provided me with an excellent opportunity to network with some amazing people and make cool friends in the process. The hackathon period was super exciting too.
All of us started with a group call where we talked about our project and laid a plan for what it should look like. I was into Machine Learning at the time and hence worked on models that would be useful in predicting data. We collaborated on GitHub (though you could do it in a platform of your choice) and kept pushing our changes as we felt fit to do so.
Of course, the time schedule was a bit hectic since we were all from different continents and this meant that I had to stay awake a bit late than usual but it all paid off to see the final group project. I approached the MLH mentors a few times for help with certain issues and they were really kind and walked me over the solution. One instance was when we were unsure about how and where we should be hosting our project.
During the course of the event, they also had mini-workshops that people could attend. Workshops range from fun events like Art/Designing events, Geo guesser, and Gaming competitions to tutorials on various topics like Web and App Development, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, etc.