I was a mentor at my first hackathon.
Weird right? The Iron Yard was a sponsor at the Forge Hackathon in Atlanta, and they asked their students if some of them would like to be mentors. I thought it would be a great experience to see what a hackathon’s atmosphere is like, and talk to people and see what they’re thinking. So I roll in Saturday morning and sit in a room just for software development. My role as a mentor was to sit and wait for people to ask for help. After about 5 minutes of sitting, I was approached by a team looking for help.

Their idea was that they were developing a wearable band that doctors were able to update their personal data. Such as basic information (name, birthday, etc) and more elaborate data such as diseases, medication, etc. The problem they had was that their target locations only had internet once every few months and didn’t know how to store their data locally. I recommended storing basic data on the wristband (before they were only trying to store the data on a server with a wristband having only an id). This way, when the doctor has internet they can push their data up to the server, allowing the internet copy to be up to date. The copy on the wristband would be as current as the doctor’s version is. So if they were to move and go to a different doctor, that doctor would have the most up to date version that their previous doctor had.
Then afterwards I explained strategies to span out their data model into separate categories to help future expansion and allow for easier transitions of adding data. For example,
instead of having a single User table, break medication, doctors, & diseases into a separate table so that adding and removing data would be much more efficient.

All in all, they seemed to really enjoy my feedback (actually, I asked if I was helpful and they said I was a huge help). My first hackathon experience was pretty awesome, it helped my resolve in believing in myself and trusting the knowledge I have to help others. It’s a spectacular feeling.