How to Prepare for a Hackathon

TL;DR The prep that actually moves the needle is smaller than most people think. Pick an event that fits where you are, show up with a team, or a real plan to find one, and get your tools working before you arrive. You don’t need a perfect, fully fleshed-out idea or to be “good enough” yet. You just need to be able to walk into the room ready to build. This is especially true for the non-traditional software creator who might be going it alone.

Registering for a hackathon is the easy part, and then come the nerves. What do you bring? Do you need a team? What if you’ve never actually finished a project before? A little bit of preparation in the right places is the difference between spending your first hours building and spending them installing software while everyone around you seems to already be moving.

Here’s what to sort out before the clock starts. Everything that happens after the opening ceremony you can find in a different guide.

Choose The Right Hackathon

Not every hackathon is built for the same person, and the first one someone attends matters more than the tenth. The two big variables are format and focus.

In-person events trade convenience for energy. There’s a room full of people, mentors a few steps away, and a hard stop that keeps momentum up. Online events are easier to attend from anywhere and let a builder work on their own setup, but they ask for more self-direction. For the record: Neither is better. They’re just different experiences, and a first-timer often does well in person simply because help is easier to find when you can look to the person at the next table.

Focus is the other variable. Some hackathons run a specific theme or a sponsor track that features a specific platform or software. Others are wide open. Your first hackathon usually goes smoother when the theme is broad, because a narrow track adds a constraint before the builder has learned how the weekend even flows. Major League Hacking (MLH) runs beginner-friendly events throughout the season, and those are worth seeking out.

Look at the MLH event calendar to find something that fits.

How To Sort Out Your Hackathon Team, Or Make A Plan To Find One

Going solo is completely legitimate, especially for a first event. Plenty of people build alone and place. But a team changes the experience, and it’s worth deciding on purpose rather than by default.

A good team isn’t built on skills alone – it’s not just “who can code.” The strongest hackathon teams cover more than one skill. Often this looks like a team with someone who builds or creates the software, someone who thinks about design and how the thing feels to use, and someone who can tell the story at the end. A person who has never written a line of code can still be the reason a team wins, because the demo is what judges see.

It’s completely normal to show up to your first hackathon without a team, and often, events are built for it. Most MLH hackathons run team-formation sessions, an active Discord, and in-person mixers where solo builders find each other. Show up with a one-line pitch of what you’d like to make, or what you’re good at, and let the room do the rest.

One thing to settle before you build: How many people can actually be on a team. Different hackathons have different rules, and there is no global rule that dictates how many people can be on a team.

Recommendation: Get Your Environment Working Before You Arrive

This is possibly the most consequential thing in this guide. The classic way a beginner loses momentum during their first hackathon is spending the first three hours installing tools instead of building. So before you show up, install Homebrew, then Python, then a database. Then realize at least one of the versions you’ve installed is wrong and do a few steps again. That was nine hours of a beginner’s weekend, before AI made most of it optional, and it’s still the fastest way to burn through time and energy that you can’t get back.

So do the setup at home, on a quiet afternoon, when nothing is on the line.

3 steps to really be prepared for your first hackathon:

• Set up a GitHub account and make sure you can push to it. Think of GitHub as version control first and a community second: it’s Google Docs for code, tracking every change so nothing is ever truly lost.
• Pick where you’ll deploy and create the account ahead of time, so “get it live” isn’t a mystery at hour 40. If you’re a software creator working almost exclusively alone or with a vibe coding set-up at home, your favorite AI can walk you through options and setting this up with very approachable explainers and step-by-step instructions.
• Decide which AI coding tool you’ll lean on, install it, and test it on a throwaway project. If you’re vibe coding your way through the weekend, you want the tool working and familiar before it counts.

If you’re new to coding, you might find these explainers on vibe coding and learning to code helpful.

Come In With Loose Ideas, Not A Locked Spec

Over-planning can really backfire. A builder who arrives with a fully specced, five-feature product has already set themselves up to run out of time, because scope creep started before they walked in the door. What’s scope creep? It’s what happens when the original to-do list of tasks you’ve set yourself suddenly balloons with things tacked onto the end, in the middle, and even into existing items. When you walk into your first hackathon, it’s best to arrive with a few ideas or directions for yourself…not a full blueprint of how you think the project or weekend is going to go.

If the event has a theme, spend twenty minutes beforehand generating rough directions that fit it. What problem could this solve? What would be fun to demo? Keep them loose. The work of narrowing a loose idea into something actually buildable happens at the event, in the first hour, and there’s a whole separate guide for that part.

What To Bring To Your First Hackathon: The Logistics

The boring stuff is the stuff people forget.

In person: You need your laptop, charger, any hardware the project might need, a photo ID, and a water bottle. You don’t want to waste precious moments trying to find someone who will lend you the laptop charger that they remembered while yours sits at home on the kitchen table.

Online: You should set up a workspace, turn off notifications, and actually block the time on a calendar so you don’t get distracted.

Plan your sleep and food strategy. The team that pushes through the night on vending-machine snacks is rarely the team demoing something coherent the next morning.

What To Leave At Home

Remember: You don’t need to be “good enough” yet.

Hackathons are where people get good, not a test you pass after you already are. You don’t need a finished skill set. In the AI era, the whole industry is learning a new way of working at the same time, which means everyone is a beginner at something. A new coder or independent software creator isn’t behind. They’re normal. And taking that first step of showing up? That’s the most important thing.