LAHacks: The most bizarre hackathon experience in my life

My 10th hackathon.

5 min readApr 27, 2014

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It was 2am, my team and I were wandering around the streets, looking for wifi.

We visited Starbucks before that opened 24/7 around the university area. Unfortunately it was crowded with homeless people and part of the area inside the coffee house was closed.

So we kept walking and explored the nearby hotels. Thanks to the very kind front desk staff, we crushed at Vintage Westwood Horizons’ hotel lobby at 3 in the morning because the WiFi connection got cut off at Pauley Pavilion. The internet was back at that time after LAHacks organizer announced it on Twitter, but we were too lazy to walk back so we pulled out our laptop and worked there.

I worked a little, and tried to get some sleep. The journey from Seattle - Los Angeles - UCLA was tiring. Dylan woke me up at 6am and we walked back to Pauley.

We met on Twitter

Arik, Dylan, Cary and I formed our team through Twitter. I tweeted to LAHacks organizer and they retweeted my tweet. Arik is a student flying from Tel Aviv and LAHacks was his last event he attended in the United States; Cary and Dylan are both computer science major at Cal Poly Pomona.

The Design behind SnapChess

Mystery guest speaker, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat made a deep but great speech about privacy on the stage(Keynote available at Scribd). Our idea was to make a parody out of it — so we built Snapchess within 36 hours, a democracy-mode chess game matchmaking web application. You have 10 seconds to decide your next move with your alliance. To make it more interesting and relevant to the audience, I had the idea of putting UCLA and USC in this game, since there is a rivalry between the two. And even better, you can hack the game — play on behalf of your enemy, make all the wrong moves, and completely ruins your enemy’s game.

I was inspired by a Dribbble shot using Delaunay Raster script, but unfortunately Scriptographer is not available on CS6 due to Adobe’s automatic wrapping of native API issue. I tweeted Tomás, the owner of the Dribbble shot. He responded promptly and suggested me to use Dmesh instead. I explored to use the tool for the first time, and the result was surprisingly beautiful.

Original image of the bear I googled on the web. I do not own the copyright of this image.

Working on Illustrator to take out the points and refine the design.

Cleaned up version of the bear mascot for UCLA.

Final version of the UCLA bear with color scheme tweaks.

I asked a guy from USC and he told me the trojans are more famous about the traveller. Apparently no one cares about the traveller mascot but I decided to use it anyway.

Color scheme is tweaked and here’s the final version for USC mascot.

Screenshot of the front page before I worked on the CSS styling. The links work.

I used Bootplus framework and apply the design for the frontpage.

PHP master Arik was debugging on the game page. This was the screenshot before styling.

Game page integrated with homepage design and CSS styling.

Demo of Snapchess. I’m sorry if you don’t like Electronic Music :/
http://youtu.be/guKuQJ4Qx_0

The End

We had an expo after the hackathon was over and we were lining up on the table demoing our hacks. It was like a little SXSW at the event and I really like the idea. One of the feedback we received, which I think is helpful — is to create a login system which enables users to play based on weight and priority if you make the right moves most of the times.

We did not end up winning and I have expected that, since we did not use any of the sponsor’s API. Is SnapChess solving a big problem? No. But there’s currently no matchmaking for chess board game on the web right now(Twitch Plays Pokemon for Chess). Is it fun? I would say yes.

Crushing at the hotel lobby at 3 in the morning and sleeping under the staircase at Pauley Pavilion — I had the most bizarre yet fun experience by attending the largest hackathon in my life(hacking with 1400 people!). I am really thankful for the organizers to make the event all possible, especially the prompt respond on Twitter.

Achievement unlocked.