| id | title |
|---|---|
mentors |
Mentors |
This section is a mixture of things you can directly steal to put in your presentations and signup sheets, and a description of how to do it.
This was something that was tried and evolved into an integral part of the hackathon. The hackers are generally smart, enthusiastic and full of energy. What they're not is experienced. As a result, they benefit greatly from having mentors who can answer basic questions for them. The net effect of that is that you get better outcomes, which is the end goal anyway. These mentors don't have to be seasoned veterans, anyone who has been in the workforce a year or two can likely help.
You need them around:
- Basic infrastructure
- github help
- Provisioning servers/containerization
- How to build in "the cloud"
- Architecture
- What technologies to use
- How to avoid reinventing all of the wheels
- Sanity checking
- Help with getting their presentation ready
- Being a soundingboard for questions
- Basic user experience guinea pig
Mentors we have enlisted your brains to help the greater good during Opportunity Hack. We need you to share your ideas, be a sounding board, and help unblock hackers that have been staring at the screen for hours.
Help to ensure teams are solving the right problem, remind and review judging criteria with them. It is completely okay to have multiple mentors visit teams during the first four hours!
This will be a mixture of debugging, troubleshooting, scope/marketing/technology recommendations. Make sure teams are solving specific problems and talk through judging criteria.
These are the golden hours of hacking, teams should be comfortable with what they are creating, they should have a clear goal and should already be writing code. You will help them make judgement calls on functionality in an effort to get them to complete something. If they are stuck, help them get unstuck.
Hackers are tired, their eyes are red, their energy level may be low, BUT they are still driven to create something awe-inspiring. Help them with their demos and pitches. Put yourself in the shoes of the non-profits - what should they focus on to come across the finish line?
Help teams figure out what direction they should take. Review the judging criteria, ask what demographic they are targeting, look for uniqueness in their ideas, assess scope problems (usually the scope is too large). Use any part of your background to help steer the team in the right direction. Pretend you are a user - ask questions to ensure hackers have considered their target demographic.
Help teams with their pitches and presentations. You'll either publish that you're seated in a specific area or rove around to have teams practice their pitches. Does the solution the team is pitching make sense to you? Are they succinct and using their time for the presentation in the best way possible?
Help teams understand how to commit their code, which is a requirement for all teams. They will also need to submit their projects on DevPost, you may need to tangentially help with that.
A great idea sitting on a laptop can't go very far. Help teams get their ideas productionalized in the cloud!
In the early hours of Opportunity Hack, you should be asking for project pitches. Listen to what the hackers are thinking and help them figure out what the right technology they should be using. Make sure they aren't trying to boil the ocean. In the later hours, you'll be helping tired hackers troubleshoot NullPointers, recursion logic, UI display issues, and a runtime exceptions.