i won more than 15 hackathons in roughly two months, including events from google, openai, and cursor. some were model problems, some were agent problems, and all of them ended with a demo that had to boot in front of someone.
that pace teaches a specific kind of engineering. find the one thing judges can touch, build the shortest honest path to it, and leave enough time to discover the environment variable you forgot.
the trophies live off the homepage now. the useful part was learning how quickly a team can turn a vague brief into a system with edges.