Going to a very short hackathon at a university tonight. Only 3 hours of programming time. Top three teams will win monetary prizes and I have not done any hackathons before.

I have no one on my team, but have openly broadcast my idea in the discord chat for the event, causing many people to say they are stealing my idea and one to dm me to talk further about teaming up.

Important caveat: although I am registered as a non-degree seeking grad student, my full time job is as a staff engineer at this university. There is nothing stated to restrict the hackathon to only students, or only undergrads, but they decide to make up a rule and apply it to me. So there's a chance that I get disqualified.

I am not a programmer by education or profession, though mechanical engineering does have programming classes and I have spent some time working with software as part of work. I'm very sure there are many undergrads better at programming than I am, but I'm not a novice.

I think about 50-100 people will compete.