Hi Tip-Sheeters,

Today is Veteran's Day, and I want to start with appreciation for any service members who are reading this. The holiday was originally created to remember the armistice that ended the first World War in 1918. Peace is a blessing that we should never take for granted.

Entering a Hackathon Quick and Dirty

As data and IT pros, we are constantly honing our craft. One of the best ways is through taking on intense challenges or projects to drive our learning in a short period of time. Hackathons or similar competitions are a great fit for this because they have a set end date and give some accountability to finish and submit.

Here's how you do it:

1. Find a reasonably interesting hackathon (two are listed below, but you can find more on Kaggle and DevPost).
2. Carve out 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon somewhere you won't be disturbed. Commit to submitting a legal entry to the hackathon at the end of 4 hours. Promise yourself a reasonable reward when you complete this. (A walk in the woods? A new novel? A luxurious latte?)
3. Spin up a GitHub codespace with the tools you need and start cranking. If you don't get trapped by perfectionism, you should be able to submit something for almost any hackathon in this amount of time (see my discussion of "minimum viable submission" below).

Three reasons you should submit to a hackathon THIS WEEKEND

There are several other benefits of using a hackathon or competition for this:

Get an end-to-end view of tech - I have found that in traditional courses and working in large organizations, the view you get of a technology is deep but narrow. For example, a programming class teaches you to create code for a set number of tasks and run it in a limited environment. An analytics task allows you to create SQL queries and dashboards, but not create the underlying databases or handle infrastructure tasks. A challenge or hackathon often allows you to build an end-to-end project with a bit of depth in a few areas. You get the 10,000-foot view that builds your big-picture knowledge.

Have a concrete deliverable at the end - When you submit to a challenge or hackathon, you have completed something. Whether it is a web page, an ML model, or an API, it's a concrete deliverable. You made this. And you often take time to summarize the project and value in a document, presentation, or video. This is fantastic practice for delivering projects at work or pitching a potential employer on what you can do for them. It forces you to own the story of what you've done.

Engage with cutting edge technology - Events like these are usually used by companies or open-source projects to draw attention to new products or technologies. So by default, you'll be getting your hands dirty with something new. Some of these may become an important standard in the industry, and others will be one step along the path. Either way, you'll be getting exposed to where the industry is going in a way that traditional classes or projects at work might not.
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Three excuses not to enter (and my responses)

Let's face it: most of us don't enter these right? I would guess of people I've worked with have never entered one. Here are some quick excuses, with my responses.

I'm not going to win - If you've looked at the winners of hackathons, they often put together some impressive stuff. You might think the only people who enter are creating projects at an amazing level. But in reality, people spend all different amounts of time to enter. Some just get their feet wet. Some go all in to get prize money. But all of these get value.

I don't have time to submit a high quality entry - You might be thinking that a contest isn't worth doing unless you make a top-quality submission. But that really isn't true. I think a great way to start is just to figure out what a legal minimum submission is and submit one of those to work the kinks out. If it's not amazing, no one is going to notice or care. Once you've submitted the minimum, then look at how you can enhance it with the time you have. (You might call this a "minimum viable submission" and it's actually quite a valuable skill for many different situations.)

I don't know enough about ___ to enter - Often times, competitions like this provide a basic hello-world type of entry that you can start with. In Kaggle Competitions, for example, there is often a starter Jupyter Notebook that you can make a copy of and submit just to test out the process. The minimum is to submit a basic package and try one or two improvements. I promise you will learn something new just by doing that bare minimum.

Two good contests to enter

Here are two good contests that are worth your time this fall:

​MCP's 1st Birthday Hackathon (Nov 14-30, 2025) - Classic example of engaging with cutting-edge tech.

Model Context Protocol was proposed by Anthropic a year ago as an alternative to vendor-specific approaches to feeding data and context to LLM apps. The industry has jumped on the bandwagon hard. This contest asks you to demonstrate one use of MCP and share it on your socials.

My suggestion for a minimum viable submission: make a sample MCP server with FastMCP, host it on FastMCP Cloud, and submit! Once you've got a submission in, start tweaking it for something interesting and new. The instructions say "You can submit multiple entries! Build as many projects as you want."

You can see all the steps for this and my sample MCP server implementation in Tip Sheet #44: Using FastMCP Cloud.

**If you submit an entry to this, please tag me on LinkedIn and I'll re-post your work**

​NFL Big Data Bowl 2026 (Sep 25 - Dec 3, 2025) - For sports data, this is the big kahuna. Every year the NFL provides data and creates different challenges. There are two tracks for this year, both focused on player movement on passing plays.

• The Prediction track (Sep 25 - Dec 3, 2025) focuses on models to forecast player movement after the ball is thrown.
• The Analytics track (Sep 25 - Dec 17, 2025) asks you to create a metric or video to analyze player movement after the ball is thrown.

Make no mistake -- people get jobs from this one.

Personally, I'm a sucker for NFL analytics, but if you have interest in sports analytics of any flavor. Dive in on this one. If you share your submission on LinkedIn, tag me and I'll reshare it.

OK, enough reading, go build something!

Keep coding,

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Ryan Day

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👉 https://tips.handsonapibook.com/ -- no spam, just a short email every week.

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