This is great. I've been to ~10 or so hackathons including both of the YC ones this year and this approach makes total sense. For the most part, the judges and

This is great. I've been to ~10 or so hackathons including both of the YC ones this year and this approach makes total sense. For the most part, the judges and audience don't care how you built something. They're more interested in the story behind the product including what sparked the idea, how you're equipped to tackle it, the market size, how you're going to get your first customers, etc. I saw groups spin up AWS instances, throw up backends, and put on a frontend framework. It depends on the idea but for the most part, that's usually overkill. For web apps, I always static hardcode everything (yep, with jQuery) and then if time permits, productionize everything if it helps the demo be more slick.