Hackathons

What is a Hackathon?

Here is a quote from MLH (Major League Hacking)

Hackathons are an incredible way to bring your community together to learn new skills, build amazing projects, and share ideas. A hackathon is best described as an “invention marathon”. Anyone who has an interest in technology attends a hackathon to learn, build & share their creations over the course of a weekend in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. You don’t have to be a programmer and you certainly don’t have to be majoring in Computer Science!

My Hackathons

After my first Hackathon I was hooked and wanted to go to as many as I could. I would end up going to the following hackathons.

Bitcamp 2013

Bitcamp was the first hackathon I had ever gone to. I was excited and nervous, this was a pretty large event and there was a lot going on. It was held at the University of Maryland College Park and was inside of the indoor stadium. It was great, there were tons of sponsors which meant free merch.

There was lots of free food and drinks and also some great music being played the entire time. I got to meet up with a few of my friends from UMBC and then also got to meet new people there. I joined a team of friends and we decided to make Bitd00d.

Bitd00d is a unique 2D rogue-like where you traverse the World Wide Web fighting foes along the way! Go from door to door blasting baddies with elemental goodness. Bitd00d lets you combine elements and create blocks for an interesting and intense combat experience!

Our team won BookHolder’s Best App/Program Using Internet-Sourced Data which was great! The prize was 1 bitcoin, at the time it was worth about $400. Some of us sold our fourth to buy a keyboard or whatever we wanted, I held on to mine. I held on to my fourth of a bitcoin so well that I lost the private key.

It is ok, I learned a lot and got more value from the inspiration from the event than a bitcoin is worth.

PenApps X 2014

PenApps X 2014 was the first hackathon that I had to travel to. I was able to find a good room at PenApps that had a few teams working in it, we all worked to help each other and learn from each other. My team found an AI framework that we used to build a chatbot with a twist. We wanted to use some of the sponsors to try to win some prizes, so we decided to use Twilio to make a bot you could text with and interact over text. We built a few integrations, we had 2 separate phone numbers that you could text, we had an android app that could intercept your text messages and respond for you.

We pitched the idea of Reply4Me to the ladies there saying

When a guy asks for your number and you do not want to give out your number give out our number. The guy will think he is talking to you and never know this way you do not feel awkward giving out your number and he wont even know.

One of our team members had turned on the app and forgot and it was answering questions his friend was asking without him even knowing. The friend did not even notice that it was an AI. And remember this was before the current LLMs that are out there.

I also made a Jokes for Pebble a little app for the pebble smartwatch. This just hit the api we had and would ask “Tell me a joke” take the response and show it on your watch.

Hack the north

Hack the north was an interesting hackathon. This was my first and only international hackathon (yes it was just Canada but still). It turned out I got sick and felt like crap the entire time. Which when you feel horrible staying somewhere that is cold and no beds is not ideal. I did have fun and there were some very cool projects that were built there.

I joined a team of people who I had never met and we built a pebble smartwatch app called poppit. The idea was it was a Bopit app for pebble, it would say to do something like hit a specific button, or shake the watch and you would get points.

We did not win any prizes, but I did make a friend and got an internship from this. Also first time having Poutine.

Mhacks V

Mhacks V was fun, I went with a few friends and got to try out some new things. I learned some swift and then built a little web app Pantry

People throw away a large amount food everyday because it goes bad or they just have no use for it. Sometimes you’re only one ingredient away from being able to make something from what you have in your pantry, but that’s not enough to drive all the way to the grocery store for. Asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar is old school, why not trade/purchase any item from each other’s pantries? That’s the idea behind Pantry. People would go onto this app and list their desired items as well as the items they have excess of in their pantry, and they would then contact each other and set up a trade.

CalHacks 2014

CalHacks 2014 was a great hackathon, I traveled out to CA bringing an empty suitcase ready to fill it with all of the merch I could find. I did not have any success building a project, but I was inspired by the projects I got to test out. I made friends with some companies there and was offered internships.

That empty suitcase I brought with me, well I filled it. I came home with over 40 t-shirts and other merch.

I Love Hackathons

I love hackathons, I loved going to these events and learning new things. I loved the energy that was in the space with everyone working hard to build something new and innovative. It was a nice way to being able to try out a new language or a new technology that you had never used before. You could chat with experts and try out something new. This helps people step out of their comfort zone and learn something new.

I believe this is not just great for students but should also be done in corporations. I started the hackathons that are still going on inside of KeyW when I worked there. I started it with our interns at the time to help inspire them to learn new things and build projects fast. This ended up being very valuable for KeyW and helped them come up with new projects that would graduate into profitable services.

I think hackathons inside of a company is a great way to break up the day to day work and help inspire new ideas, workers can also find new areas that inspire them and can help them enjoy their work. This can also help team building across teams inside of the company.

Also a little bit of competition won’t hurt anyone. It is fun to compete with the team next door to see who can be more creative.