Hackathon quick start checklist
Work through these steps to get set up and start building.
Hackathon checklist
We suggest Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex.
Can’t run a coding agent on your laptop?
Some participants may be using corporate laptops where local installs, IDE extensions, or coding agents are restricted. That’s okay — you can still participate. You can follow the manual AppKit quick start to scaffold and deploy a Databricks App with the CLI: Getting started with AppKit.
If possible, try to form a team with at least one person who has a local coding-agent setup and can iterate on the app. Not everyone on the team needs to work on the app code at the same time — other teammates can focus on data exploration, product direction, evaluation, storytelling, the final demo, and other areas where a local coding agent is less valuable.
You can also use agentic tools that don’t require local setup:
- Databricks Genie Code — use Genie Code inside Databricks for help understanding the dataset, writing SQL, exploring tables, shaping the data work that powers your app, and creating and managing the app.
- Browser-based development tools — tools like Replit can be useful when your laptop can’t install a local coding environment. Check your company policies before connecting accounts, repos, or data.
If your team is blocked by laptop restrictions, don’t spend the whole hackathon fighting the machine. Shift work to the teammate or environment that can run the app, and use Databricks itself for as much data exploration and prototyping as possible. Ask hackathon mentors for help and ideas.
Sign up for Databricks Free Edition. New to Free Edition? The Free Edition setup guide walks you through it. Once your account is ready, move on to the next step.
Use a personal Free Edition account, not your work or enterprise Databricks account. Building and demoing on Free Edition keeps every team on the same playing field.
- After clicking the Open in Databricksbutton, you’ll be prompted to sign in.
- Use the same personal account you used to sign up for Free Edition.
- Once you’re logged in, you’ll be redirected to the dataset page.
- Click the Get instant access button in the top-right corner and accept the terms and conditions.
- Once the terms and conditions are accepted, an Open button will appear. Click it to add the dataset to your Databricks workspace.
Follow the Databricks CLI guide to install it on your machine.
The CLI guide covers this when you install it — just double-check you’re authenticated to your personal Free Edition workspace (the same one you added the dataset to), not a work or enterprise workspace. See Authenticate in the CLI guide.
Install agent skills so your coding agent knows how to build on Databricks.
To get started quickly, use the App with Lakebase template to scaffold a Databricks App backed by Lakebase.
Note: once your data is clean and ready, use the Sync Tables: Unity Catalog to Lakebase (Autoscaling) template to bring it into Lakebase.
Databricks Developer Hub