How To Hack (Together) An Environment
The talk that saves the first 4 hours of every hackathon. Setting up development environments from scratch, fast, and getting a team productive before the pizza gets cold.
Why this talk matters
I've organized and participated in dozens of hackathons. The single biggest time sink? Environment setup. Teams of talented developers spending hours wrestling with Node versions, database connections, and "it works on my machine" instead of building.
This talk was a practical guide to going from zero to productive in under 30 minutes. It covered version managers, dotfile configurations, shell aliases, editor setups, and the art of a good README that actually helps people get started.
Key takeaways
- A team's velocity is limited by the slowest setup experience. Invest in making the first 30 minutes frictionless.
- README-driven development isn't just documentation. It's onboarding infrastructure.
- Automate everything that you'd otherwise have to explain twice. If you're saying 'just run this', it should be in a script.
Born from the frustration of watching brilliant people waste hackathon time on setup. This became a recurring pre-hackathon briefing.