Last weekend, I attended my first hackathon: “Hacktoberfest” by Hack Nashville.  After finally recovering most of the lost sleep, here’s a bunch of random thoughts — rapid fire mode!

It was tons of fun! That pressure to deliver in 48 hours enables you to do amazing things.  It was an absolute blast, especially working with my friend @thomasbernstein.

Don’t just go to win.  I set the challenge of switching from PyCharm IDE to just using VIM for development and I can tentatively say it’s worked!  Switching to a text-only editor’s pretty difficult and I’m still struggling, but without that weekend of intense use, I’d probably never switch.  Go to hone your craft or learn something new.  If it really doesn’t work out, hey it was 48 hours!

Abstract all the things!  With so little time, you can’t get bogged down in implementation details.  You have to execute NOW!  Only if you abstract lots of layers will you be able to put together a working product by the end of the weekend. Here are some things we used:

  • GitHub.  Best version control - hands down.  It was Thomas’ first time using version control, so the Mac GitHub app helped abstract out all that complexity. Perfect!
  • Heroku.  My first time deploying something on it, so a little clunky at first. But once I got the hang of it, Heroku is amazing at abstracting all the infrastructure crud you don’t want to have to worry about.
  • Django.  The best web app framework available in my opinion.  Database: abstracted with ORM and Model classes.  Views: abstracted with generics.  Form validation: taken care of.  Logins, sessions, etc: done.  Django allows you to avoid almost all the repetitive code & focus on your business.
  • Sendgrid.  Our app, www.chroniclehq.com needs to reliably send emails to people.  So we just used SendGrid to take care of all that.  Abstracted away!

The Nashville tech community is getting stronger.  The enthusiasm and energy of all these Nashville developers was fantastic.  I’m excited to see it keep growing.

Geeks love space.  A bunch of us watched Felix’s jump on the projector.  And it was awesome.

Kudos to the Hack Nashville volunteers that put this together.  Can’t wait until the next one!