My first hackathon win was not the best-engineered thing in the room, and I knew it while I was presenting. Parts of it were held together by luck and a hardcoded value I was praying nobody would ask about. What we had that the other teams did not was a clear story about who the thing was for and why it needed to exist by the end of the weekend.
Tim Wagner was in the room, and getting a serious question about the architecture from someone who has built infrastructure at that scale did more for my confidence than the prize did. It reframed what these events are actually for. You are not there to win. You are there to compress a month of learning into thirty-six hours and to find out who takes you seriously once you have built something real.