A Failed Success : My First Hackathon@Brown

Hackathons are great. That’s what I’ve always heard.

So after a semester or so of procrastination and laziness and some rather ironic back stories, I ended up at Hack@Brown. There I was, standing 6hr-flight away, among the east coasters that had no idea what my school was, new, and alone. After some self-embarrassment of walking around with a “MEME?” sign during team formation, I managed to assemble myself a Team Dank Memes and set on to waste the next 24 hours of life away (also, fun fact, 90% of people who approached me were girls). After some communication, we decided our roles fairly quickly, and dived straight into production.

Coming with the urge to practice design skills, I became the designer of the team. But there was one thing I underestimated: designers are engineers do not get along. Furthermore, both of our engineers (back-end & mobile) are way more experienced than me.

I straight up panicked. The idea phase was literally a “storm”; my mocks and front-end UI were not made in time before our engineers started building; my UI element specs wasn’t specific enough until after the product is built. It was nothing like what I experienced at the start up I work for over break, where our engineers just pipelined other parts of the production while waiting for my UI guides. Middle of the night I called in an UX mentor in attempt to re-organize a design guideline for our project, only to get secret eye-rolls from our developers already in the mid stage development. At the end, even though our back-end is very much functional, we ended presenting with a could’ve-been-less-broken UI.

Setting out to fuck around and ending up making the way to the finalists was definitely a huge accomplishment, but before our presentation, I actually fell into a depressed state. Because of my unprofessional-ness, not only did I not get half of my original designs implemented, throughout the entire process I felt like being doubted more and more by our back-ends till the point that the only UI I have control over, which is the front-end web interface, was turned down by the team in fear of “breaking the back-end code” although I already have everything working and readily available for update. Clouded by frustration, I backed down and stayed silent for the rest of the presentation.

I remember impulsively running towards my UX mentor (thank you so much Cindy) out of piling distress after the finalist announcement, seeking for an answer to the designer-developer war. One thing she said really struck me: what we defend is not only our design, but our way to being a designer. I didn’t know how to respond then but to give a half understood nod. The entire hackathon experience was eventful and exiting (especially the slipping in Comic Sans part), but the melancholic confusion stuck with me even after the announcement of our best first time project win.

After the decision to pursue a career in design, I have always felt a little lost. Our school really doesn’t offer much HCI to undergraduates; what applied to job seeking in engineering no longer worked as I get turned down by numerous engineering recruiters. I wasn’t even sure if I should present myself as a designer or developer. Although I’d like to be both, I clearly do not have enough professional design experience, at least, to gain strangers’ trust beyond the scope of my current company. But Cindy was right. The logic is easy: whatever it is you want, fight for it; interface, trust, or future.

At the hackathon, all of my teammates learned a lot; our back-end had no prior back-end experience and really did an amazing job at the end. For me, I did stay mostly in my comfort zone skill-wise, but I feel that what I came to eventually was way beyond. Of course, one awakening does not make me a instant master designer, but I do hope the lesson is learned.

Never forget.