Here’s a tip that I learned this past weekend:

“Always share your ideas… always”

I participated in my first hackathon this past weekend and placed 4th on the pitch out of 17 teams. We showcased a very cool idea to help prevent fraud and reduce the chances of stolen credit cards. I learned that it was essential to have an awesome team. We knew what to do and with very little management and conflicts, we got the job done. We implemented all the features, integrated from end to end, made nice UI tweaks, and prepared a 2-minutes pitch for our project all in 24 hours.  It feels amazing to be up on stage to present our pitch but once that was done, I got a chance to rest and withdraw on the fat boy also known as the yellow bean bag while waiting for the judges’ results.

What did we tried to solve?  We wanted a way to minimize the impact of having ones credit card stolen. The idea was to create mock credit card numbers to serve as proxy to the real credit card. For more details, screenshots, and comments from judges, you can check out here:

http://www.hackathon.io/smart-pay

Another best part of the hackathon was the prizes.  I won this droid!  I can’t wait to start programming it.