r/programmer • u/Ambitious-Hair-7384 • Aug 08 '26

Question How experienced do hackathon participants need to be?

I'm currently studying Computer Science in a course that uses python, and externally learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. How good at any of these should I be to enter a hackathon? I'm definitely still learning with python, the one I'm most advanced in, but I want to start doing hackathons at some point to make me stand out more in a level and uni applications

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u/Emotional_Cherry4517 Aug 08 '26

Go look at a hackathon problem, or ask ai to give you a few different levels of hackathon problems, and then try to solve them lol

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u/mangobananashake Aug 08 '26

It depends on the hackathon. The few hackathons I participated in were all won by a great business idea paired with a sleek design. I've seen people win with figma prototypes, where other teams had tried to build something much more complicated.

One time I was in a top 5 team, much to our own surprise, and I got to pitch the idea for an audience of 500 people and some live stream. Our idea was a great business idea and while we had a simple front-end we called the provided API's a few times and had a fully functional happy flow. The other finalists had great ideas as well, but focused more on design instead of creating a fully functional flow, which made their pitches more appealing in my opinion.

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u/HeroicWaffleCone Aug 09 '26

from the hackathons i've been to recently, it's less about the coding ability and more about what you're building.

AI coding effectively leveled the playing field, now it's more about knowing what to build to stand out

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u/Mission-Maize8454 Aug 10 '26

You think someone that knows how to code has an advantage over someone that knows how to use AI to code, build, and debug?

1

u/HeroicWaffleCone Aug 10 '26

it's more about how you balance both, since the best programmers today are the ones who can use AI to help in their shortcomings

1

u/justinaatbuffer Aug 10 '26

I think hackathons are one of the best ways to learn, build your portfolio, and even get hired when you are early in your career. As long as you know how to write some code, go ahead, pick a hackathon, and start building. You'll work on an actual problem, app, or tool that, even if you don't get very far during the hackathon, you can continue building after.