

How many times have you won a hackathon? (As in top prize) - ismaelc


======
ivancho_O
Once.

On fall 2011, my college friends and me entered a local hackathon to create a
mobile app for Mexico city. At that time we were still students and the event
was held on weekdays so the first team that we thought was modified several
times due to this. In the end 3 of four members of the original team showed up
plus one friend we invited out of panic.

We didn't have enough confidence because most of the participants were
experienced IT professionals who entered for leisure or mobile development
companies seeking for talent or attention and we were just students who had
less than a year working on Android. From our point of view we were under-
qualified and we feared to public ridicule.

It was a 2 day hackathon of non-stop work where the result was a totally
functional app for routing using public transportation. Everyone was shocked
for the amount of work we achieve in 48 hours, mainly because most of the
teams had just unfinished prototypes and we had a ready to distribute app.

The next year we participated again, this time the whole team, but it wasn't
the same, we had a plain participation. I couldn't help but feeling
disappointed and thoughtful of what went wrong. It might be overconfidence or
that we were lucky one year before. I am willing to try again sometime in the
near future.

The important is that thanks to that one time we won, we got to know to a lot
of talented people, got to own a top app, and got the chance to work in a
national cool IT company and we helped to fund one of the companies of the
first batch of 500startup MX (but that's another story). All of this before
our graduation!

~~~
ismaelc
Thanks for the response ivancho. I am really keen to hear developers'
experience with hackathons. I'm gathering exactly this sort of story you just
shared. It appears that the resulting theme with hackathons is that you meet
really talented people, and get a shot at partnering with bigger companies.
Would you mind sharing what you guys did?

~~~
ivancho_O
Sure. The product we developed in hackathon is MetroDF for Android
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crayonlion...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crayonlion.metro))
then for iOS (<https://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/metro-df/id528831959?mt=8>).
This year we got to participate in Yaxi [yaxi.mx] Android
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zebstudios...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zebstudios.yaxi))
and iOS (<https://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/yaxi/id551201698?mt=8>) and backend.
In the meantime we got to work in many apps for third parties where we
polished skills a little.

This year we graduate so we hope to re-release MetroDF and work in our own
projecs.

