The Troubles of Working with a Database at a Hackathon (AidStream Story)

When people talk about hackathons, they talk about the demo. The pitch, the UI, the "aha" moment on stage. Nobody really talks about the person who spent the whole weekend making sure the data didn't fall apart. That was me on AidStream, a blockchain-based aid distribution platform we built in a weekend and trust me it wasnt that easy as it seems. At a normal project, you can revisit your data model whenever.But during a hackathon you cant since when teamamtes start working on top of your tables it means both codes may start breaking . Serverless Postgres was the right choice for a hackathon: no local DB setup, no "wait, whose laptop has Postgres installed" problem. Everyone could connect to the same instance immediately. The gotcha was connection limits — with multiple people hitting the same database while testing features simultaneously, we ran into connection issues at the worst possible time (an hour before demo). So next time you watch a hackathon demo go off without a hitch, remember — someone probably spent the whole weekend quietly making sure the database didn't have a say in it. If you're the one holding the schema together at 2am, know this — it's not the flashy role, but it's the one that decides whether anyone else's code even runs.