Winning my first Hackathon and what I learned from it

Last month, Hashnode and Thirdweb got together to conduct a hackathon and I was quite excited for this one.

I didn't have an idea of what to make at first but then one day an idea popped into my mind. There was 13 more days for the Hackathon to end.

I created a new NextJS project, and started working on my project. I had to finish the project, launch it and write a blog post on it before the month ended. I got to to work and spent a lot of time developing the application. There were some problems but I got them figured out.

After I submitted my entry to the Hackathon, I was, naturally, waiting for the results and once they were out I was really excited.

I was quite happy to see my name on the winner's list and told my family about it and they were quite happy and congratulated me 🥳

The project is called TwNFT and it lets you mint your tweets as NFTs easily and for free. Do note that it is currently running on a testnet.

Here is the project - Live / GitHub

What did I learn from this Hackathon?

I learned a lot!!! I had participated to learn more about Thirdweb (and subsequently, web3) and learned a lot while making the application. This was everything from how the Twitter API worked to how the Thirdweb SDK works and a lot more. I had to also write a guide on using the application and a blog post about it. You can read it here.

What mistakes did I make?

Yes, I did make some mistakes. I spent a lot of time working on styles and other visual aspects instead of working on the core functionality of the app which I had left for the last few days. When I was implementing NFT minting, I ran into some problems as the serverless functions Vercel supported has a 5-second timeout so I had to migrate all of the backend over to Heroku. This was also the first time I was building a dedeicated backend for a real project and ran into more problems regarding CORS and body parsing.

This also needed me to make some changes on the frontend and doing everything in the last minute turned out to be a huge mistake. Even my landing page wasn't ready!!! Hence, I had to settle with a very simple landing page.

The Producthunt launch

Yesterday, I decided to launch TwNFT on Producthunt (I should have on launch day but there was a certain urge in me to wait till the winners were announced).
I didn't expect it to blow up or anything. I shared the launch on social media and as of writing this, it has been about 23 hours (but launch day is over). It got 27 upvotes, 9 comments (5 of which were me explaining the app and thank you comments), and it was at the 23rd position. This was my first Producthunt launch and I did mess up a little bit with it. First of all I launched it 1.5 hours after launch day started and then the product images weren't that good (realised this after launching it). This should be a lesson for me in the future. You can see it here.

What's next?

The journey last month has truly been an awesome one. This month, Hashnode has collaborated with Netlify on another Hackathon and I am quite excited for this one. I have school exams but I already have an idea. Also, I have learned from my pasts mistakes and hence I am already building out the app's core functionality 😅

I am looking forward to hearing from the community about their past experiences in Hackathons and other competitions. Let's discuss!