My First Hackathon
I participated in the spring 2016 session of HackNY recently. As my first hackathon, I’d say things went very well. Lots of people with ideas, lots of food to complement. The hackathon was hosted at NYU’s Courant Institute, a building that gives off a huge suicide vibe. In fact, all of NYU gives off a weird suicide vibe. One oddball occurrence took place when I went for a walk around the block at night. A man was urinating into one of the plant tubs posted outside the back exit of the Courant building.
I joined a group trying to develop a wordpress plugin for clarifai.com, a web service that provides image recognition and tagging services. None of us knew how to program in PHP very well. We had a bad start as we didn’t all set up a development environment for PHP. I set up a wamp server to test short PHP code and spent 5 hours trying to figure out how to do http get and post requests using PHP’s curl module. I managed to get an authentication token, but then I ran into more difficulty actually using the token. My teammates had more success, but eventually the 24 hour aspect of the hackathon burnt us all out 10 hours early. Half the team became sick from stress and we didn’t submit a completed project. Overall, we should have stuck to what we knew.
The projects submitted at the end of HackNY were mostly dull, save for the exceptional few. A hardware hack involving a camera in an altoids tin, a game analogous to wikipedia races but with gifs, and a VR pillowfight are projects that really stick to memory. There was a duo of high school students who made a language learning tool. They used translation tools to read non-english language articles and add those words to a quizlet.com quizlet quiz for later study. The majority of dull projects, including my failed project, fell into the category of linking APIs together but not to a high degree of usefulness.
The high school kids include Mr. Jack Cook is a regular boy genius akin to Jimmy Neutron. I remember being a sophomore in high school. I was too busy struggling with school and questionable behavior to do anything useful.
What a time to be alive.
