Last time I went to a hackathon I brought a 15 inch Alienware from 2017 which has bad connections in the USB system and is on the edge of death. I loaded up Visual Studio and the Unity Framework ahead of time so I'd be ready to use the same tools as my team.
Personally my favorite hackathon kit is a tablet plus a keyboard and a mouse. Remote desktop into a big computer and you have the sleekest kit anyone has and the most powerful computer. I have a powerful computer at home but I have ADSL, it is possible to remote into but latency is pretty bad.
My plan, the next time I go to something like that, is to set up a cloud instance ahead of time and just boot it up. Somewhere between $1-$2 an hour would buy a powerful machine which would really be a bargain if I only want to run it for 20 hours on an occasional weekend.
