Spring Semester is always busy for me. Between academic competitions (like DI), track, and making time for my friends, things can get very hectic. Despite the chaos, I love the spring semester for many reasons. One of the things I love about it is the opportunity to go to a couple hackathons. This year, I went to TAMUhack and HackDFW. In today’s post, I’ll be sharing what I learned.
TAMUhack2019
As is often the case with the projects my team undertakes at hackathons, the idea was decent, but our implementation was somewhat lacking. The basic premise of Candidata was to make it easy for people to access reliable information about local politics. Ideally, we would have done this by having some method of data aggregator that could read from official sources and concisely summarize a candidate’s views on specific issues, as well as pulling information about what topics would be voted upon in upcoming elections.
Due to time constraints, we made it so that the candidate enters the information themselves. To store the data, I wrote an API in Golang that allows easy dara exchange. On the frontend, my two teamamtes worked on designing and implementing an app in Flutter.
Side Note on Flutter
I’ve been working with Flutter a lot recently (my friend wanted to learn it too, which is why I let him take the lead at TAMUhack). I am really enjoying it so far and I’m using it for a couple side projects. It has been a quick learning experience and (mostly) easy to use.
The biggest problem I ran into at TAMUhack was when I tried to implement facial recognition into our app for the passwordless auth challenge. To kill two birds with one stone, I wanted to use Microsoft Azure’s facial services (another one of the sponsor challenges). I spent about the last eight hours of my hacking trying to get it to work. Everything was just a big mess of FutureBuilders and JSON messaging.
All that wouldn’t have been so bad if I had actually gotten it to work, but I didn’t. That really put a damper on the whole experience. In fact, I felt that I got so wrapped up in the facial recognition that I forgot to take a step back and enjoy the hackathon. I walked out of TAMUhack2019 somewhat disappointed. It had nothing to do with the organizers, it was my own poor planning. I was determined not to make the same mistake at HackDFW two weeks later.
HackDFW2019
I was pleasantly surprised by HackDFW’s change of venue this year.
We initially went in wanting to do an AR project, but due to the slow wifi messing up downloads and googling we ditched our original idea for something a bit simpler. We wanted to make a game, and we ended up making something inspired by group party games like Mafia and Werewolves mixed with the mechanics of games like quiplash and kahoot. The game was called Funny Business. There were three categories of players: the manager (1), the employees (8), and the consumers (everyone else playing). Without going into too much detail, the employees were given prompts and the manager and consumers worked together to eliminate employees until only one remained.
From a technical perspective, I was handling the backend again. I also set out to learn some javascript. I am planning on going into freelance development soon, and I knew it was important that I start learning more web technologies. As always, I really enjoyed working with Golang. Because I was in a rush, rather than use websockets for the kahoot-like lobby, I used Server Side Events. It was much easier to implement than I thought it would be.
I think I accomplished my goal of having a better time at HackDFW. I even got to compete in the Smash Ultimate tournament.
I wrote the post to encourage those of you who may be going to hackathons soon to remember to have fun and learn something new. Don’t get so wrapped up in sponsor challenges that you don’t enjoy the experience.
Did you go to a hackathon recently? What was your experience like? Tell me in the comments below!
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