over 2 years ago

Tips from previous Community Challenge winners!

There have been some truly innovative projects built using Facebook products in previous hackathons.

Freweini and Magezi won Regional First Place in the 2018 Developer Circles Community Challenge and Regional Best Pre-Existing, Updated Solution in the 2019 Challenge for their project, JusticeBot. They wanted to pass along some hackathon tips and learnings to help you along the way:

Participating in the 2018 and 2019 Developer Circles Community Challenges hackathon via our project JusticeBot has been a life changing event. Hackathons are all about challenging yourself to bring out your potential, which you might not know is there until you see the result.

The way we see it, hackathons challenge you in two ways: first, your skills and, second, your mind. You have to be flexible and open to learn new skills (for example, tools and languages) while focusing on productivity because of time constraints.
When it comes to challenging your mind, you have to come up with an idea that is both relevant and feasible. The more unique your idea is able to solve a problem, the more opportunity you might have to build a serious startup that can help lots of people.

JusticeBot was conceived and had its first code lines written in a hackathon, but today the solution has helped 76,000 people by preventing or resolving their most pressing justice concerns in Uganda and Congo. Our vision is to provide access to justice to 6 million people and jobs to 6,000 lawyers across Africa by 2025.

Do you have a tip you’d like to share with your fellow devs? Be sure to share it in the Hackathon Facebook Group - we know they’ll appreciate it!