How to Prepare for a Blockchain Hackathon as a Newbie Coder

5 min readDec 7, 2021

From Canada’s CryptoChicks to the Polkadot APAC or ETHCapetown hackathons, blockchain hackathons are becoming the hot ticket item on programmer agendas. If you are a newbie, hackathons are very welcoming environments for new coders.

For the unprepared, though, hackathons are sweaty palm events. After all, a hackathon is like a job interview and exam rolled into one. Even if you lose the big prize, if you demonstrate your programming prowess in front of the influential panel of judges and senior developers present, you could land a job. And indeed, many hackathon attendees make lifelong career connections at these hands-on learning events.

But like anything in life, preparation improves confidence, and confidence boosts performance. So let’s delve into how to prepare for your first blockchain hackathon.

1. Set Your Own Goals for the Hackathon

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of a hackathon. Remember, a hackathon is a sprint and you need to stay focused on your end goal to reach your objectives. Depending on whether you have joined to develop a dApp or API for your portfolio, find a job, or master a new coding language will influence which projects and teams you join, and workshops you attend.

2. Conduct Your Own Mini-SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Understand the company and project — Study up on what the software or hardware project aims to accomplish both short and long term, and where they are on the road map to date.
What solutions does this technology want to solve? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the current software solution?
Explore the competitive landscape — Who are the competitors and what are their technological solutions?

Lightbulb ideas often go off at this stage.

3. Assess Whom You Want on the Team

At many hackathons, the teams are formed on the first day of the event. Other times, teams are assembled at the application stage. At the very least, give some consideration of the ideal makeup of your team. If you are working on a backend solution, having 4 UI/UX designers on your team could be a big handicap.

4. Prepare the Pitch

Hackathons are open for newbie programmers, experienced developers and anyone else in between. If you are a newbie, you may want to sit on the sidelines and watch how experienced developers pitch presentations. This is an opportunity to size up some of your co-hackers and contemplate whose team you want to be on. Whether or not you plan to pitch, going through the process of preparing a project and pitch will sharpen your skills and knowledge of the project. Some hackathons will ask for a video demo of your pitch as part of the application process.

5. Study the Hackathon Technical Documentation — Preparing for the ParaState Rust Hackathon as an Example

Your team will value your contributions more if you are an expert, or at least knowledgeable, in the technical aspects of the project before arriving at the hackathon.

Technological innovation moves fast in the blockchain world. Most recently, the development community has been abuzz with the release of the Rust SDK SewUp for Ethereum.

For new and experienced developers alike, the ParaState Hackathon and workshops on Writing Ewasm in Rust are an opportunity to learn how to develop Ethereum-compatible dApps in the popular and much-loved programming language for Web3.

ParaState provides the fastest way to seamlessly migrate your Ethereum dApps to the popular Polkadot and other Substrate blockchain ecosystems using the innovative Ewasm virtual machine, the SSVM Pallet. (The ParaState SSVM pallet is at least 10x faster than the leading non-WebAssembly runtime solution)
And now you can do so with the easy-to-use Rust programming language, in addition to 20+ other languages.

The ParaStarte Hackathon for developing Ewasm and EVM-compatible smart contracts and dApps is running for two months (October 16–December 15). Developers can win up to 100,000 USD in prizes. The deadline for submitting a project is before 15:59 (23:59 UTC) on December 15th, Beijing time.

Here’s how to prep with the ParaState technical documentation:

Familiarize Yourself With the ParaState Toolkit

If you want to get ahead of the coding crowd before the hackathon, here is all the info you need to prepare for the ParaState Hackathon using ParaState’s next-generation toolset to create top-notch blockchain applications.

Sewup (the first Rust SDK compatible with the Ethereum network)

https://github.com/second-state/SewUp (the first Rust SDK compatible with the Ethereum network)

2. BUIDL (Browser-based IDE)

https://github.com/second-state/buidl

3. ParaState Testnet Plato

(RPC link: https://rpc.parastate.io:8545)

4. Any Ethereum ecological tool, ParaState is fully compatible with Ethereum EVM

5. ParaState Testnet Faucet

https://testnet.faucet.parastate.io:8001/faucet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xrHCE0qlrM

6. Node Configuration Guidelines

https://github.com/ParaState/frontier/wiki/ParaState-Testnet-Node-Setup-Guideline

Study the Developer Learning Documentation

https://github.com/ParaState/substrate-ssvm-node (the first scalable smart contract execution environment that also supports EVM and EWASM)

ParaState GitHub: https://github.com/ParaState

Join the Hackathon Workshops on Writing Ewasm in Rust

Join Antonio Yang, the Senior Rust Engineer for the ParaState Foundation for a series of workshops on Writing Ethereum WebAssembly in Rust. Replays are available on YouTube.

Create Your Hackathon Project Demo Video

ParaState requires you to plan out your project in advance by providing a demo video (5–10 minutes) explaining the project.

Do Not Forget to Sign Up for the Hackathon

To compete for the total of 100,000 USD in rewards at this virtual event co-organized by DoraHacks, complete the online form: https://hackerlink.io/grant/Parastate/

Check out our step-by-step guide by clicking on this link.

Also consider the time commitment. Choosing a one-week hackathon for your first time in the coding bootcamp trenches may be overwhelming. Above all, go to the hackathon with a teamwork mindset. Hackathons are no places for maverick coders.

Come Hack on Plato — The First Public Testnet With Both EVM & EWSM

ParaState has officially launched its public testnet, Plato, currently running as a standalone Substrate blockchain. Plato is the first production-ready public testnet featuring both EVM and EWASM. By supporting 20+ programming languages to create Ethereum-compatible smart contracts, ParaState is uniting a larger developer community to boost cross-chain interoperability and enabling them to surf in the highly optimized industrial standard infrastructure while exploring brand new possibilities at the Ethereum frontier. Learn, explore, and experiment in Rust at the frontier of Ethereum at the ParaState Hackathon. ParaState is prioritizing and emphasizing fast execution and delivery of novel research on production while committing to radical transparency and open-source values on our development journey.

See you at the hackathon 👇

https://www.parastate.io/hackathon/

About ParaState

Known as Ethereum on steroids, ParaState is a multi-chain smart contract platform bridging the application and developer ecosystem between Polkadot, Substrate and Ethereum, as well as other chains wanting to provide Ethereum compatibility. While supporting the EVM pallet to provide seamless compatibility with all existing Ethereum applications, ParaState also provides developers with a next-gen smart contract implementation environment, Ethereum-flavored WebAssembly. These two infrastructures are ensured to talk to each other and share the same account system on ParaState.