Buildathon 1.0: Post-Mortem

Two weeks ago, I participated in Buildathon 1.0. It was a whirlwind of innovation and sleep deprivation.

Lesson 1: Build for the user, not the stack

We spent too much time arguing about using Redis for caching when we didn't even have a working landing page. Validation > Optimization.

Lesson 2: Integration is the bottleneck

The most complex part of our project wasn't the AI model; it was getting the Auth flow to play nice with the database schema.

I'm already looking forward to version 2.0.