Song of the Week

Introduction

This week is a much shorter and much less technical post. I participated in a mini hackathon yesterday, and I had such a great time I thought I'd share my experience.

Code Challenge

We were giving a code challenge, a few hours to work on it, and then we all came together to share our solutions. The challenge was to build some UI cards in React. We had the option to use some starter code or to start from scratch. Here's what I came up with:

Takeaways

It had been along time since I had done a hackathon, so I was reminded how great they are. Here are some of the reason you should participate in one:

• It can break you out of a coding rut. Sometimes when you're spending a lot of time learning to code on your own, you can get bored and lose your motivation. Meet up online with other people and working on a new problem can be like a shot in the arm. It gets you excited about coding again.
• You can learn so much from other people. Problems that you may have been struggling with for a while can suddenly become so clear when you get help on them from other coders.
• You don't have to be an expert. Everyone at these events are at different levels, with strengths in different areas. Someone may help you with something your struggling with in CSS, and maybe you help them with a bug in their React files. Everybody wins, learns, and is better for it.
• You meet great people and can build a community of other coders that are also trying to learn and grow their skills. And community is what it's all about!