Buzzing with chatter, the auditorium was filled with college students averaging about a foot taller than me. Navigating half-confidently through the unfamiliar crowd, I motioned to my teammate, a fellow high school student, to come over and help claim some empty spots for our other two teammates. We then had a casual conversation with college sophomores from Michigan as the rest of our team arrived and the commencement began. For me, that was the start of one of the best experiences of my life: my first hackathon, PennApps 2013, the renowned nationwide hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania.
That first night, for 6 hours from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., we worked on setting up OpenCV — an open-source computer vision library — on Android. After many failed attempts, we finally were able to run sample facial recognition code on a smartphone. At that point, we were running on 20% caffeine and 80% willpower. We decided to program a fun but interesting Android application to automatically remove photobombers — people who unexpectedly jump into photos at the last minute to try to “bomb” the photo. I worked mainly on the workflow design and programming for photo acquisition as well as front-end development on Android. It was slightly frustrating since I was new to Android development; I had started learning the Android application programming interface from books only two weeks before PennApps. The main challenges were thus the unfamiliarity with the API and the seemingly small but frustrating bugs that I had to battle with. It took me a whole two hours from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. the second night because I did not realize the subtle difference in XML tag names between different layout types. Yet I refused to sleep until I figured out the solution that I knew was right in front of me.
After a great deal of work and a total of six hours of sleep for three days, my team was able to create a functional application. The collaborative energy in our group and the hackathon overall was intense. Never had I worked in a more accepting and exciting environment where everyone was passionate about what they were doing. On the last day, we waited, laughed and talked with other participants, all relieved that we would soon be on our way home and in our beds. Then after a while, sponsors finished handing out stickers and we discovered the judges’ results. We did not win anything or place. In fact, we did not even make the top twenty.
Despite our failure, PennApps 2013 was an unforgettable experience. In the end, we made an application we were proud of, pushing our abilities to the limit. On a technical side, I learned how to use computer vision practically in a smartphone application. But beyond the technical skills I earned, the experience changed my attitude toward creative development and programming. I learned how to deal with problems so frustrating that I wanted to give up. I truly grew as a developer by pushing myself to learn various new technologies in a short amount of time and then solve problems by finding creative solutions using those technologies. In that amount of time, there was no time to walk away from a frustrating problem, mull it over, and come back the next day. We each worked through the night, determined to fix the bugs in our code without taking a nap until we had solved the problem. In fact, instead of discouraging me, this failure has revealed to me my passion for working on projects and research in environments that are not purely classroom settings. It has given me the motivation to keep persevering towards my goals, and taught everyone in my team so much that we went on to win second place overall at HackRU 2013, another college hackathon at Rutgers University a few weeks later. A few months later, we went to PennApps Spring 2014, and my team of three high school students won the Best Use of Bloomberg API award.
