Your Hackathon survival guide (modern stack, 2025)
My advice and exact tools & technologies recommendations after being a judge in 10+ hackathons.
👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager.
Participating in hackathons is something I recommend every Software Engineer and Engineering Manager do at least twice a year!
If you're reading this, chances are you're either thinking about joining a hackathon or getting ready for one.
That's awesome! You're already ahead of the game by preparing properly.
As someone who's seen great ideas fall apart because teams wasted time, I want to share a few tools that can help you prototype FAST.
None of the tools below are sponsored or anything like that. They are just tools I genuinely love using in my day-to-day on side projects. For example my website Tools for Engineering Managers uses many of them.
Here’s the setup I’d use if I were hacking tomorrow:
Core development
Warp: The intelligent terminal. Become a command line power user on day one.
Windsurf: The world's most advanced AI coding assistant for developers.
Next.js: The React Framework for the Web.
Tailwind CSS: Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.
Framer Motion: A robust animation library for modern web projects using JavaScript, React, or Vue.
shadcn/ui: A set of beautifully-designed, accessible components and a code distribution platform. Works with your favorite frameworks. Open Source. Open Code.
Drizzle + PostgreSQL: Object Relational Mapping with the world's most advanced open source database.
OR MongoDB Atlas: The most effective way to deploy MongoDB.
Yaak: Yaak is an offline and Git friendly app for HTTP, GraphQL, WebSockets, SSE, and gRPC.
Get 50 Notion templates & The EM’s Field Guide when you subscribe
Documentation & Design
Notion: Write. Plan. Collaborate. With a little help from AI if needed.
Excalidraw: An open-source online tool designed for creating digital drawings and visualizations with a hand-drawn, sketch-like style.
Figma: The Collaborative Interface Design Tool.
Presentation & Demo
Google Slides: Presentation program and part of the free, web-based Google Docs suite offered by Google.
Loom: Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity.
Make your life easier / better
Zen Browser: Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with features. We care about your experience, not your data.
GitHub File Icons: A browser extension which gives different filetypes different icons to GitHub, GitLab, gitea and gogs.
Refined GitHub: Browser extension that simplifies the GitHub interface and adds useful features.
Hyperswitch: An open-source global payments orchestrator that connects with multiple payment processors with a single API.
n8n + Airtable: Automate most things you need, really simply and fast.
Ollama: Get up and running with large language models on your computer.
Raycast: An application launcher and productivity software developed for macOS.
My best advice after being a judge in 10+ hackathons
Pick one feature and build it well. Aim to have a working demo rather than mocked backend or just presentation slides.
Build a strong story. Your pitch should make the judges feel the pain point AND see your solution solve it.
Backup your demo. Always record a Loom video. Live demos will crash more often than you think. Have a back up plan.
Have fun with it. Celebrate every milestone that you hit. Connect with people.
See you in the next one,
Stephane
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If you're preparing for interviews, I am also writing this newsletter for architecture design that you might be interested in:
Just judged my first hackathon so I second the things fail during demo time. The video presentations are key! Great suggestions.