Organizing Hackathons

If you're organizing a hackathon, you may want to go through this page for tips on preparation

Basic do's and don'ts

Don't rely on stable WiFi. Bring a router, and get to know the Internet infrastructure beforehand from the venue
Do check the intended status of essential services like Bugzilla or mxr beforehand. You don't want them to go down during the event.

Bring flash drives with a mozilla-central clone (or whichever repo you intend to work with)
Don't assume that everyone has Linux. Prepare for Windows users by having a local copy of all the dependencies.
Try to identify some easy, open bugs beforehand. Have plans for how to solve them, files to look at, etc.
The first build is long. You might want to plan things accordingly, maybe having users set up a build before the bug-hunting starts.
Consider having attendees choose tasks/start investigating solutions while waiting for build environment setup. You can still use tools like MXR/DXR while the code is being copied, for example.
Consider pairing up attendees if one person's build environment will take significantly longer to set up than the other.