Hi, first subscriber!
So I tried my first hackathon and realized that going it alone against teams of 4–6 people and trying to do everything at once is a VERY BAD first experience.
Analyzing my mistakes...
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I wasted the first day on planning, designing models, choosing a tech stack, and initializing the project—all of which I could have done in advance, since I already knew what topic I’d be working on.
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When you’ve always developed natively for Android and want to build a project on KMP with some kind of real backend in 48 hours, it’s a guaranteed failure.
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You have to do what you’re good at, not just what you know in theory; otherwise, you’ll waste a ton of time figuring out all the little details that only come with practice. For example, who knew that the `Preview` annotation wouldn’t work at all in KMP, even though JetBrains showed in their articles that everything worked?
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And most importantly—don’t try to build a “pretty” project; instead, apply your knowledge as quickly as possible and demonstrate the full extent of your capabilities. In other words, don’t sit around trying to recall all the patterns, anti-patterns, and development principles.
KMP is a very powerful tool that truly enables a single developer to complete a large number of tasks in a short amount of time, but it’s also complex and requires some experience. Ktor has already shown me how awesome it can be from the client’s perspective, but now I’m definitely going to build the backend for this project using it—even if it’s no longer part of the hackathon.