If you have ever played 王者荣耀 you know that it’s impossible for your team to win EVERY match. Perhaps you have acquired this common sense through other means of team sport, such as basketball, unicycle hockey, ultimate frisbee, Quiddich, or Hackathons. If you read through this whole article, you will learn how remembering the simple acronym WIN can keep your winning streak alive, for hackathons.
Don’t know much about hackathons? Read this article by my fellow Hackathon Wingbird Cromewar to learn more, and come back when you are ready to unlock my secret recipe to triumph!
A hackathon, like Olympic artistic swimming, has judges, competition and “tracks”. Unlike the Olympics, your team most likely will not see your final score or get any feedback other than whether or not you won a prize or were disqualified (they might not even tell you!). Also unlike the Olympics, no one cares if you are using performance enhancing drugs. They will be doing their best to prevent other forms of cheating, so be sure to always read the rules and expectations.
Hackathons are like performance enhancing drugs, they can be addictive and have surprising or often unwanted side effects. If you think you or someone you know may have Hackathon Addiction, please join the Web3 Library Discord Server and tag @librarian during your self-introduction. —Tippi Fifestarr (this is not medical advice)
Some people will tell you that you can do anything you put your mind to, or that you can achieve whatever you believe. This is hogwash. The trick is to put your mind towards the right thing, and to believe in the right ideas, people, or missions. If you use the WIN approach, you can certainly win every hackathon. Simply stated: In a hackathon, the real project is yourself. Set yourself up for success by being clear with yourself (and others!) about your intentions, and keep your core principles pure. Your experience, the friendships (or at least, friendly rivalries) and what you learn are unhackable.
You can fill your wallet with hackathon prize money, but cannot stop MrRobot.eth (or whoever) from hacking you.
WIN is an acronym that I synthesized from my study and experiences during a year of intense focus on hackathons, where I whole-heartedly participated in 10 hackathons. In the beginning, I was a total hackathon n00b, grinding through the beginner workshops and losing teammates left and right. After a few hackathons, I started to iterate on the theme of hackathon project about hackathons, only building something that I thought could solve a hackathon related problem. I won some prizes. Now, I’m someone who’s read The Hackathon Survival Guide by Sam-Larsen Disney cover-to-cover while hosting a monthly Hackathon Workshops Workshop and event organizing the upcoming Hackathon Hackathon (metaHackathon(0))!!! If that’s not worth at least two exclamation points, I don’t know what is.
Can you prove that I just made up WIN in order to have a memorable hook and an incredibly provocative article title? Bet you can’t. Keep reading! —Tippi Fifestarr
Wingbird is a word Legal Eagle Ivona and I made up one fateful phone call. I ran with it, and started building a lore and culture. Cromewar and I even built a Web3 Hackathon RPG Sim Game called World of Hackathon Wingbirds.
It’s important to remember on a hackathon team, someone may take more leadership (fly at the front) but we are all equals and flying to the same destination. Since many hackathon teams suffer from misalignment on expectations, the Hackathon Survival Guide suggests beginning your Wingbird flight together with a Ways of Working Session.
“A ‘Ways of Working’ session is a discussion used to acknowledge that everyone is different. Everyone has different work habits and this meeting acts as an open forum to discuss expectations that we can align on while preserving everyone’s ability to focus on their work individually. Hosting this session is critical when you’re working with people you’ve only just met. Understanding how they work best and enabling that will make the team more productive. Keep the session casual.” — Sam Larsen-Disney, Hackathon Survival Guide (emphasis by Tippi Fifestarr)
By learning about each others personality, styles of learning, working, and collaborating, you are enhancing your Wingbirds Instinct with Wingbird Wisdom. By sharing your hackathon hopes and fears, you make it easier for the team to support you and mitigate disaster.
DnDnDiffusion | Everything pays off
Like a stack of books, a diverse set of experiences can contain the knowledge or intuition that makes or breaks a project, team, or business plan. Unlike a stack of books, you don’t need to buy an extra-large suitcase to carry them with you! This is why hackathons kick ass and can level up even the most hopeless of Wacky Wingbirds if they do their best, reflect on the experience, and try again.
6 months ago I wrote that google doc as I was just beginning to explore Stable Diffusion as a tool to help make TTRPG more fun and easy to play (or at least visualize!). While I can’t make you love the idea behind ceptor.club, you don’t need to. It’s clear as day that building version after version, over time, hour after hour, you can feel the power in iteration.