Hackathons: Should you participate even if you are not a hacker?

‘Why attend a Hackathon? These events must be only for young hackers or geeks. I am a 30 years old business person, even working in the area of Internet of Things, so I must be irrelevant for this kind of competitions. Why to waste my well-deserved weekend?’ This was my thinking before taking the decision to try it at least once. I WAS WRONG!

Like most people who may have thought like me.Hackathons are sprint-like events (usually for a full weekend) full of energy in which business and technical people meet together to build teams with complementary skills and develop in less than 48 hours feasible solutions (Minimum Viable Products – MVP) for specific industries (depending on the theme of the hack

athon). People from different backgrounds (bankers, marketers, consultants, developers, data scientists, UX, entrepreneurs, etc.) and different age groups (from young kids to retired professionals) meet in a common plac

e trying to think business ideas and in limited time to deliver them properly in front of a judging panel. Despite the different age, skills and backgrounds, the motivation of the participants is usually the same: to learn new concepts and meet interesting people while they have fun.