TLDR

Before I forget this amazing feeling, I want to write down something to document my experience from this hackathon. This weekend, I participated in

organized by , and other sponsors. It’s my first hackathon in my life! And me and my teammates won the Best Performance Improvement award 🎊

If you are my friends, you would probably find I am annoying since I post a lot about this hackathon and how happy I was on Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Forgive me, that’s because I am super happy.

Motivation

I gotta say, I am really glad I joined this hackathon although the timing was not ideal. The hackathon happened at the most busy time in my first semester at Cornell Tech. It’s at the final few weeks of the semester. Lots of projects and deadlines. Who on earth crazy enough to show up in the hackathon?

Well, me. (and other cool hackers and students lol)

The motivation behind the decision to sign up this event was probably I always want to be a open-source contributor. Not gonna lie, this goal had been in my TODO list for a while. I want to be part of open-source community since I think open-source contributions is something that can truly differentiate real programming enthusiast and average coders. Only people who really love writing code will be fool enough spend their hobby time working on other organizations’ repositories for free (just kidding).

And, partly because I am looking for a job right now (Software Engineer Intern @ US, 2024 summer), I’ve been seeking a way to prove my proficiency in software development. That’s why I think I gotta participate in hackathon and seize this opportunity to make my first step toward open-source contribution.

In hindsight, the decision was goddamn right. I successfully made my first open-source contribution. Cleared one of my goals in my TODO list. It wasn’t as hard as I thought before. Even better, my team won the best performance improvement award in the hackathon and won $2000 dollars. That was something that I had never expect from this hackathon. Huge S/O to my two teammates. It was totally worth it to sacrifice our sleeping time for one day lol.

Experience & What did I learn

If I could time travel back to a few years ago, I would give my younger self one advice: Do more hackathons!

I really learned a lot and gained a lot from this hackathon. Plus, the event is free. Therefore, that’s a pretty good investment for myself.

Let me breakdown what did I actually learn a lot from this experience here.

Teamwork is the key to success

Among all the successful teams I observed from this event, they all had a great chemistry. I know it’s a bit cliche but allow me to emphasize the importance of the teamwork here.

We only have ~30 hrs to finish the challenges in the hackathon and, given that nearly all of participants had never contributed to the codebases of the sponsor companies, it was actually quite challenging to finish some perfect big features within that period if you did it on your own. (Unless you are a fking badass lol). What I want to convey is that, it’s really important in hackathon to discuss the challenge and split the workload. For example, when we wanted to extend a feature involving both frontend and backend in the existing codebase, I told my teammates:

Okay, I can start working on frontend logic at first and using some mock data to test it, and you guys can look at the backend code and try to modify it.

That’s how we did and I am glad we split the workload in this way now. That’s the main reason that we can finish a cool challenge in this hackathon. Figuring out how to maximize the efficiency is the most important takeaway I got.

Reaching out for help

Trying to solve the problems by yourself is good. However, that is not smart to be blocked by something for too long, especially in this kind of event. Asking for help is one of the most undervalued skill in my opinion.

Luckily, we had the mentors and the engineers from the sponsor companies here for us to ask. And the people are nice enough to let me ask some weird questions. What I’ve learned is that, open-source community is full of nice people. So don’t be shy or don’t hesitate to ask questions! (Even if it’s not helpful sometimes, at least I get the chance to practice English lol)

Pitching the idea confidently

At the end of the event, teams were asked to pitch the solution or something they built to sponsors, judges, and other participants. Actually, at that time, we did not have a perfectly finished feature. The solution was hacky, the code might contain bugs, and our solution will fail on some edge cases. So, we decided to only showcase the simplest case to other people.

Surprisingly, the feedback from the judges was really nice. People seem impressed by us. I think it’s okay to not finish a perfect feature in the hackathon. As long as you show you have the potential or creativity to build things, people will be impressed by you. So, the takeaway is that, be confident on what you’ve built and pitch the idea with confidence!

Kudos

Thanks to folks who make this happen! Thanks to my awesome teammates in Team Losing! Thanks to sponsors for the prize. Definitely will do more hackathons in the future 🤑