Running a hackathon is a logistics job wearing a technology costume. The code is the easy part. The hard part is that hundreds of people need to know where to be, what to eat, who to ask, and how much time is left — continuously, for a day and a half, while exhausted. Getting called out for having the best-organized event at UCLA meant more to me than any build award would have.
The trick was refusing to improvise anything that could be decided in advance. Signage written before anyone arrived. Judging criteria published up front. A schedule with slack built into it, so one thing running late did not cascade. Organizing well is invisible when it works, and that invisibility is the entire product. Participants should only ever have to think about what they are building.