5 Mistakes for joining Bolt's Biggest Hackathon

After recovering from illness and taking time to heal, I have reviewed the recent events and concluded that my five mistakes were related to my participation in the hackathon.

1. I tried to start the hackathon too late. I thought that as a developer, it should be quite easy to get into vibe coding, but I started quite late, in the middle of the month, and almost couldn’t finish one project.
2. I looked down on this hackathon and thought I could build a few to join the competition. In the end, I only managed to complete one.
3. I attempted this hackathon while I had a client project going live. I needed to provide support on-site and ensure the project went live successfully, which significantly reduced my time to build for the hackathon
4. I had forgotten that I promised the kids a short staycation before the end of the month, which greatly reduced my time to work on the project, causing me to miss the last weekend rush when Bolt gave us extra credits to finish the project.
5. I didn’t spend enough time understanding the tools before I started, which explains why about one-third of my working time was spent trying to understand how the tools work.

Overall learned from the mistake and hopefully I can do it better next time!