A third year in a row participating in the Sitecore Hackathon with my coworkers at Paragon. I have learned from the previous years I have done this not to make the same mistakes, mostly. See Top 5 Reasons of Failure and Top 5 Reasons the Experience Was Better. However, nothing is ever smooth in the world of web development. So here is a quick summary and lessons learned for next time.

Pre-planning:

We made sure we could get into the GitHub repos. All was good there.

Hours 1-2:

Got the hackathon rules and we started coming up with ideas. I am just going to fix my install for 9.1 that I should have done beforehand that I cannot figure out why it is not working. Well I hopefully can get that finished soon. Okay we came up with some decent ideas and time to start documenting those ideas.

Hours 3-4:

Oh look 9.1 is still not quite installed. My teammates probably want to send me over to Magneto’s team at this point. However at least our idea is solid, but wait a minute…

Hours 5-6:

We need a new idea as all our ideas were already done in different variations. Hey, look at that finally got Sitecore 9.1 working.

Hours 7-12:

Alright we have an idea that solves a problem. Let the coding begin!

Hours 13-17:

Okay finished coding. Let’s surprise our teammate with the new idea we came up with while he was taking a break. He thinks it is a good idea and documentation has begun.

Hours 18-21.5

Video created, documentation created, GitHub repo checked. Let’s finish this up and get it checked in.

Finish:

Time to sleep.

Summary and Lessons Learned

Well I haven’t learned all my lessons. I should have not assumed 9.1 would install as easy as 9.0. In my defense I did have food poisoning the day before and still feeling it. Despite that setback and getting an idea off the ground we made it in time this year. Win or lose I love doing this contest every year. It is a good time to bond with co-workers who I may not normally work and learn new things. One big thing we learned this year was keep the idea simple. That 24 hours comes quick. Solve a problem with your idea, but make sure you can do it in a good time. Documentation takes longer than you think.

Going into the Sitecore Hackathon:

Finishing: