Running a hackathon sounds straightforward until you're three days out and half your sponsors have gone quiet, the venue AV system is broken, and you have 200 people arriving on Saturday morning.
The idea
HackAthlone started as a conversation between a few of us who were frustrated that most tech events in Ireland were Dublin-centric. Athlone sits in the middle of the country — it made sense to bring something to the midlands.
We wanted it to feel different. Not just another hackathon where people build half-finished apps for a panel of judges who nod politely. We wanted projects people would actually continue after the weekend.
What broke
Almost everything, at some point.
The registration system we chose couldn't handle bulk emails. We ended up manually sending 200 confirmation emails the night before. The catering order was wrong on day one. The judging criteria we published were too vague and caused arguments on the floor.
Each of these was fixable. What surprised me was how much the team's morale held throughout. People stepped in for things that weren't their job. That's something you can't plan for — you either build that culture early or you don't.
What worked
Keeping the format simple. Check-in, kickoff talk, 24 hours of building, demos, done. We resisted adding workshops and panels and side tracks. More format = more surface area for things to go wrong.
We also kept the judging criteria to three things: does it work, does it solve a real problem, would you keep building it? That cut the post-judging complaints significantly.
The number that still surprises me
Seven of the projects built at HackAthlone are still active in some form six months later. That was the goal. That's what I'll measure future events by.
What I'd tell myself before starting
You will underestimate the logistics by a factor of three. Double your buffer time, triple your volunteer count, and write everything down — because the version of you at 2am on day two won't remember what the version of you three weeks ago decided.