Hackathon Resources

date
Jan 19, 2019
slug
hackathon-resources
status
Published
tags
Tech
summary
type
Post
This article is a companion to a tech talk I’m giving to Monta Vista Highschool Entrehack event.
Click here for the Keynote presentation, and be sure to click ‘show presenter note’ on top left for my notes.
These links are a rough guide to help you get started with your hackathon project. Use them wisely.
The key is to focus on the vision and fleshing out your ideas during the hackathon and not to spend time dealing with app architecture and boilerplates.
Read this if your goal is to win. Otherwise, you can skip to the next section.
Ultimate 8 Step Guide to Winning Hackathons – garyyauchan – Medium

Tech links

Prototyping
Sometimes you could do really well with just prototyping the user experience without doing any coding. Invision is a really good service to try this. If you prefer a native Mac app, I highly recommend Flinto.
Web Builder
If you only need simple websites and prefer drag and drop, Wix.com & Webflow works really well.
Infrastructure
Firebase is the easiest to get started if you need to store data like user accounts, pictures, database, etc. For more complex infrastructure, use Amazon Web Services (AWS) or MS Azure.
Web Boilerplates
This project is a very popular web boilerplate that has a lot of services baked in. Easy to get started too. It also have a bunch of recommended libraries/links for you to use.
Some other boilerplates if you prefer React.js or Rails.
Cross Platform (Electron)
If you really need to build apps for all platform, you should use Electron.
iOS
iOS is pretty easy to get started, but this awesome page helps to find projects that you can reuse.
Explore
GitHub is the most popular source control website and you should use it to search for projects to clone or to learn from.
You should also checkout this mother of awesome lists to find out other awesome lists.
Machine Learning
Adding machine learning capabilities are actually really easy with these pre-trained models and services. Use CoreML Models if you are building for iOS. You can also try Amazon Rekognition or other ML services for web and mobile apps.
SMS
If you want to play around with SMS sending/receiving, you should try Twilio.
Hit me up if you have any questions.

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