My First Hackathon
How I Fell In Love With Hackathons: Part I
Two years ago, I attended my first hackathon: HackA2thon. I was hooked. Since that weekend, I’ve attended dozens of hackathons, helped organize more than a few, and started MHacks, the largest hackathon in the world, at Michigan.
It all started at orientation. I was enrolled in both the College of Engineering and The Ross School of Business as a Pre-Admit. As part of our freshman engineering requirements, we were required to take an intro to programming class. I overheard some kids talking about how they were going to take the accelerated intro to programming (ENGR151) and their enthusiasm caught my attention. I looked the course up in the brochure and it stated: “this class is intended for students with extensive prior experience programming or students who were extremely passionate about programming.” I had never even seen a single line of code in my life, but I walked right into my advising appointment and confidently told him that I was extremely passionate about programming and wanted to take 151. He didn’t even think twice and built my schedule around the class.
Walking into class the first day, I was still convinced that I was going to be typing a lot of 0s and 1s. Growing up in South Florida, I had close to zero exposure to anything tech outside of the crappy laptop I used to surf facebook, play games, and write papers. After the first class, I was completely lost. There were AND, OR, NOT gates, for loops, and if statements, but no 0s and 1s. My buddy Asher assured me that he could help me with the class as programming came easy to him and he had messed around with it a ton in high school. I sat in the front of the class and took notes like a maniac every day; he sat in the back and played Tetris. Things started to make a little sense as I studied the material more, but then we had to do a project — the professor said it would be a breeze, but I didn’t even know where to start writing the code. Luckily, Tom our lab GSI took the time to help Austin Feight, the other student in the class who had never coded before, and me out.
I forgot where I heard about the hackathon, but it sounded like something really awesome. I had an idea that I wanted to build — I had been struggling to memorize all the formulas for my calculus course, and I really wanted a door cover on the inside of my dorm room door so that every time I walked out of my room, I’d see the formulas. I looked into the psychology of it all, and, despite banner blindness, seeing the formulas repeatedly before learning them in class would make them much more familiar to the brain. I didn’t want to stop there though — I wanted a door cover that would have modules for every one of my classes containing the information that I was most likely to miss. I also wanted door covers with modules for all of the freshmen courses.
I actually almost didn’t end up showing up to the hackathon. I had a meeting before it and was already going to be a few hours late. I really wanted to build a website that could automatically generate these door covers though, so I went anyways. As I entered the room, most of the teams had already formed, so I thought about just leaving, but on second thought decided it would be zero loss to pitch my idea. If nothing else, I would get some feedback. The first four people I pitched to didn’t seem to really care for it much — they seemed to also care much more about pitching their own ideas.
Then, a guy named John walked over, mentioned that he heard a bit about my idea, and wanted to hear more. John had a Masters in Education Technology, and after pitching him on the idea, we set off to build it. Two hours later, my crappy laptop burned out. Not that I was much use with it anyways. We didn’t even think about stopping there. After getting a better picture of what this product, aptly named the Door-K(nowledge), would look like, John began showing me Ruby on Rails, which he said we could use to easily build a site that would generate these Door-Ks. I was amazed at how quickly it all came together, and we ended the weekend with a full prototype, including a full-sized Door-K that I ran to Kinko’s to print before the demos. As crappy as it sounds, I still think Door-K was a great idea, but the most important thing I took away from the weekend was that John had superpowers. My eyes had opened to the possibilities. He could build anything with that Ruby on Rails stuff!
The rest of the course was really intense. I would disappear for days working on the projects in the basement of Pierpont Commons, only to resurface for a few minutes to grab a quick naked smoothie, some mike & ike’s, and a bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red. By the end of ENGR151, I had logic gates, iteration, and selection down. More importantly, I had fallen in love.
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The most important takeaway from my first semester of college is to say “Yes.” Almost every hackathon I’ve attended, I could’ve passed on. Instead of hesitating, I just forced myself to be a “Yes Man” so that I simply didn’t have the option to say “No.” Want to become a hacker? The first step is to say “yes.”
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At every hackathon I’ve attended, I’ve learned something new. Some of these lessons, I think are worth sharing, so this is just the first post in my series on “How I Fell In Love With Hackathons.” If you want to follow the series, sign up here: bit.ly/signuptoheardavetalkabouthackathons
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Next Step: Startup Weekend (spreading your passion and convincing people to join your cause), Facebook Michigan Hackathon (build shit that people will actually use)
