ServiceNow Hackathon June 2017.
Let's get one thing straight. Hackathons are fabulous learning experiences that fuel skills and serve to inspire developers old and new to create fantastic applications and service-driven functionalities at all levels.
Hackathons are also fun, vibrant and welcoming environments designed to excite seasoned coders (who think they've seen it all before), new 'greenhorns' (who have yet to cut their coding teeth at all) and bring in those non-techies who have fantastic project management or solution-solving skills.
I could go on. There are many ways to summarize what's great about ServiceNow Hackathon's and tomorrow I am privileged, along with some fantastically talented colleagues, to host Service'sNow first, global Hackathon.
Preparation prevents poor performance
To get everyone in the zone for this Hackathon I'd like to offer some astute advice from those of us that have been around the block a few times. Writing on ServiceNow's Community blog, ServiceNow Technology Partner Product Manager David Gatley reminds us of a few key preparation steps.
It's really important to create or join a team at the Hackathon. Team play is what the Hackathon is all about and creating a structure for your 'new business' means everyone can think about their special, specific role to get into the mindset even before the event.
As Gatley says, "Create a new team -- and if you plan to be the team leader, choose your name. You need to create a registration code for others to use to join your team when registering. Any combination of alpha/numeric will work, just be sure it's something easy to remember."
At the Hackathon
Once your team is finalised you will be provided with an instance for the Hackathon as well as login credentials. From there, these tips will help you succeed:
Time is off the essence, pick a problem to solve or application use case and start planning how to build it as soon as possible.
Consider early on how you will present the final demo of your solution for the judges and plan to improve it along the way. You are going to have a small amount of time (compared to how much you spent developing) to show the value, innovation and solution your application has -- so bear that in mind.
Show the judges your app in action as if they were a customer buying your application. Start with the high-level big picture and leave the technical details (what kind of cool scripting you did, what kind of workflows etc.) on the side until you get asked about them.
Clue: if your application is truly stunning, the judges might not even want to know how it works, just because it clearly works so well.
Kick and Innovate! Think outside of the box; the ServiceNow platform can do practically anything, so use it for something we haven't seen before!
Hit the Innovation Button
Once you've taken all that in, get ready to hit the Innovation accelerator button and blast everybody away. ServiceNow Hackathons create amazing applications, amazing team ideas and amazing integrations. Before you sit there watching another team thinking 'why didn't we think of that?'… start thinking of it now yourself.
Above all, have fun, have a great time and make friends. Let the games begin!
Stay tuned here, via #HackNow and @ServiceNow_EMEA to see what we get up to and if you want to explore your very own Hackathon just get in touch.
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