Think smaller

This is something I view along with the "Ship it" idea. When I work on any project, I try to think of what the minimum is for the project to reach the real alpha stage. Where it is at least usable. Only then do I begin to entertain the various notes I have made on additional features or details.

I always go back to the sentence: "The best camera is the one you have". Finishing something and getting it out, no matter how much it lacks in terms of features, is important. The best way to finish is to keep it simple (or small).

Almost anything is daunting when taken as a whole, but when broken down into smaller steps becomes much more approachable. Nice writeup.

On a somewhat related note: When cross-site requests are turned off the text renders as black text with white dropshadow on red background which is very, very hard to read. This may or may not be under your control, but I would support the idea of graceful degradation - if the bells and whistles are turned off, the text should render as black on white or some such high contrast thing. Thanks.

Can you say, "feature bloat"? I think your mantra helps avoid that whether in a hackathon or not.

Spot on description of motivation at the beginning of a hackathon.

I find that more often, what you're describing comes from the "business folks" in a group, that don't know what is involved in shipping apps on an aggressive deadline.

I agree. I've got a little personal mantra of my own that goes "Don't worry about the big problems, they're just lots of little problems to be done later"