WELCOME BACK!
We have last, but NOT LEAST, the third part of our Mintbean Success Stories series! We are taking a look at Bryan Sillorequez's Mintbean hackathon process before, during, and after!
If you would like, start with MB Success Stories PART ONE (Ryan Tran) HERE , then MB Success Stories PART TWO with Leo Yulin Li HERE!
Bryan Sillorequez find him on LinkedIn here
Question 1: Was this your first hackathon? What does the word hackathon make you think? Does it intimidate you or excite you?
Bryan: This was my first hackathon and it did intimidate me at first. Having to complete a project in a certain time frame was daunting, but after doing the hack-a-thon, it wasn’t as intimidating as I thought it would be.
Question 2: How did you choose your Mintbean hackathon team? List one top quality from both partners!
Bryan: I picked the team by working to my teammates strengths. I didn’t work on projects with Leo or Ryan but I did sit in a zoom room with them and talk about our individual projects and we would help each other out if we had a bug. Leo is very smart and knowledgeable and he brought a lot to the table. He wanted to write in typescript and I didn’t know, and I was open to learning and so was Ryan. Ryan is very determined and meticulous. I remember he put a lot of attention to his full stack project and I thought it was quite amazing. I remember sitting in a zoom room and him telling me the lengths he went to make things perfect.
Question 3: What made you excited about Mintbean’s hackathon specifically? Anything catch your eye that made you think “wow, I HAVE to do this”?
Bryan: I wanted to do the hack-a-thon to break the monotony of doing data structures and algorithms for hours a day and I thought having to create a fully functional app would be fun to do.
Question 4: What was your inspiration behind your winning project, "tmrw"?
Bryan: The inspiration behind tmrw was to create a clean fully functional app that would make a great portfolio piece.
Question 5: What were your struggles during the hackathon? What were your wins? Those A-HA moments that make you wanna high-five everyone!
Bryan: Leo and Ryan both mentioned the tour feature and I would have to agree that, that was the biggest challenge. We all have never done anything like that and it came to a point where we all made copies of the branch and tried to figure something out. After reading out some code from the repo and what Ryan wrote out, I debugged a few things and was able to get what we needed shown in the modal and Ryan was able to put together the finishing touches of the tour.
Question 6: How did the “Mintbean method” help your hackathon experience? Did you get help from a mentor? Did you get help from the community?
Bryan: We worked on our own but using featurepeek was pretty cool so we can see our progress. Every once in a while I would look at the discord channel to see if there was something that someone used that we can potentially use.
Question 7: How was your experience POST Mintbean hackathon win?
Bryan: Post Mintbean, I found my experience to be positive. Within in a day of posting we won, I was contacted by recruiters and several people on my LinkedIn network who liked the project enough to either use it or share it to their networks.
Question 8: Did this impact your job hunt in a positive way?
Bryan: This helped my job hunt, adding a new portfolio piece and it shows the consistency that I have across all the apps that I created. It also taught me knew things like typescript to be able to talk to interviewers about.
Question 9: If you could tell someone who is too intimidated to try a hackathon anything to encourage them, what would you tell them?
Bryan: I would tell anyone just to do it. No matter how intimidating it is, you’ll learn a lot about coding and yourself during the process.
Question 10: Would you do a Mintbean hackathon again?
Bryan: I would do a mintbean hack-a-thon again. I thought it was a lot of fun.
Check out the winning project here: mintkanban.github.io/MintKanban/#
Well, that is the conclusion of our THREE PART MB SUCCESS STORY! We will be interviewing our next winners soon for you to learn of their journey! Thanks for reading!
To learn more about Mintbean, the community, our workshops, and meetups, check out our website here: mintbean.io
If you would like to attend a hackathon yourself (or with a team), check out our upcoming hackathons here: