I was a developer in a startup weekend last month, and our team did really well. What helped us the most was that all the developers were familiar with the framework and VCS we were using (Django and git). None of us wasted any time installing anything or reading the how-to docs for beginners. We hit the ground running and wrote the most code of any group by far.
To prepare, make sure you're familiar with at least one popular framework so that you can join a team that's using it. Also, learn git and/or hg if you haven't yet.
If you're lucky (like I was), one of the teams using your framework will also have a good idea.
Comments
I was a developer in a startup weekend last month, and our team did really well. What helped us the most was that all the developers were familiar with the framework and VCS we were using (Django and git). None of us wasted any time installing anything or reading the how-to docs for beginners. We hit the ground running and wrote the most code of any group by far.
To prepare, make sure you're familiar with at least one popular framework so that you can join a team that's using it. Also, learn git and/or hg if you haven't yet.
If you're lucky (like I was), one of the teams using your framework will also have a good idea.