This slightly unethical reason I have won or placed at every single hackathon I've ever attended,

This slightly unethical reason I have won or placed at every single hackathon I've ever attended, winning thousands at universities like Harvard and SDSU. Best part about the tip is that it applies to virtually every hackathon problem and tech stack. Let me explain. Nine times out of ten, any project being built at a hackathon has these four things: a front end, a back end, a database, and some sort of authentication. Technology you use to build these things can be very different, but the core interaction remains mostly the same. So often I see folks spending their first couple hours at hackathons connecting and spinning up these four components. In doing so, they run into various issues connecting to their database, with OAuth, etcetera. They waste hours setting up the infrastructure, running into bugs, and sometimes quit before they even get to the problem they're trying to solve. Here's what you do instead. First, figure out the tech stack you and your team are comfortable in. For me, that's Next.js and Vercel for front end, FastAPI and Fly.io for back end, and Supabase for auth and database. The unethical tip is that whatever your stack may be, you should be coming into the hackathon with a template or skeleton of your desired tech stack. It should be a repo preconfigured to already handle the communications between the four things like an authentication flow, a basic user database, etcetera. This template should have a single .env file to set your environment variables. This will allow you to easily substitute endpoints and keys for a new Supabase project or back end URL. Doing so, when it's time to build, you're not wasting time setting up your stack, and thus can immediately extend your template project to meet the needs of the problem you're trying to solve, giving you more time to brainstorm, build and present novel features for the hackathon. So whatever your stack may be, create your template, go to the hackathon, and collect that check. Thank you so much for watching! Drop a follow and I'll see you tomorrow.