How to Rock your first Hackathon: Tools and Resources

A couple of weeks ago, Adria Richards (West Coast Developer Evangelist with our friends at SendGrid) hosted Girl Develop Its’ “How to Rock Your First Hackathon”.

She went through some of the key resources anyone should have ready (not just the ladies) for your first hackathon:

Learn To Code Resources

• TryGit: a great way to learn how to use Git versioning, the go-to versioning tool for most hackathon teams.
• Codecademy APIs: get up and running on APIs in no time.
• Learn Ruby The Hard Way: but ultimately, the best way.
• Vim for Rails Developers: learn to edit your Ruby on Rails code easily.

Text/Code Editors 

With text editors, you should look for plugins and cross platform compatibility. Adria recommends: 

• Sublime (for Mac, Windows, Linux): most of the group agreed that this was their favorite text editing tool.
• Textmate: for Mac. 
• Komodo Edit: for Mac, Windows and Linux.
•  TextWrangler: for Mac. 

Wireframe Tools 

These are essential for mocking up your app/web service:

• Moqups
• Basalmiq
• Easel.io
• iPhone mock up (for iOS apps)

File Sharing - Adria recommended not waiting too long to consolidate front end and back end files at hackathons. Having a central repository for all files helps make this seamless. 

• Dropbox 

Web Hosting - these are all platforms that can host your hacks. Select based on programming language/platform you’re building on.

• Heroku (web)
• Windows Azure (web and mobile) 
• DotCloud
• Parse (backend data and mobile) 

Mobile Development - for mobile app building:

• JQuery Mobile
• Titanium
•  PhoneGap
•  Xcode (iOS)
• AppCode (Xcode alternative)
• Eclipse (Android)
• Tiggzi (mobile development platform) - check out Tiggzi's offer for Mashery developers while you're at it!

Web Design Templates that are responsive and mobile:

• Twitter Bootstrap 
• Foundation

 Surveys - a great way to get customer validation and data for your pitch:

• Google Docs Forms
• SurveyMonkey - my own addition, a great survey tool.

Finally, here’s Adria’s slides from that night to get you motivated to attend a hackathon - after all, now you have all the tools you need to rock it!

Here are Adria’s slides from that night to get you motivated to attend or host and rock a hackathon.