In January, we celebrated our fourth birthday as western Canada’s largest hackathon. nwHacks 2018 was chock-full of fresh inspiration, and was by far our most memorable weekend yet.
Equally, for us organizers, crafting this 750-person event was a strong highlight of each of our university experiences. We can’t possibly distill into a single Medium story what we’ve learned, or how we’ve grown as a team and as individuals, over those six extraordinary months leading up to Jan 13–14.
So please bear with us as we try.
nwHacks 2018 in numbers:
We admitted 993 of our 2068 unique applicants. 86% of those hackers RSVP’d “Going” (for reference, nwHacks 2017 saw 77%), and out of that group, 666 or 78% checked-in on Sat Jan 13, just shy of the previous year’s 79%.
Unsurprisingly, our largest meal was Saturday dinner — we served Chinese food to 527 hackers and then treated them to seconds (and yes, thirds).
And while our hacker count increased by 23% from last year, number of submissions shot up by 34% — a whoppin’ 115 projects were created at nwHacks 2018 👏
But just describing the event in numbers doesn’t paint the full picture. Tremendous efforts were poured into enhancing the entire experience, which started months before anyone set foot inside LSC. This year, we implemented a number of improvements across all facets of the hackathon:
A more objective, merit-based assessment process
In our previous years, assessing an applicant was a matter of glancing at their resume, LinkedIn, GitHub, and written responses, mentally comparing them to those already assessed, and selecting “Accept,” “Waitlist,” or “Reject.” For 2018, our team wanted a more formalized and impartial way to assess 2k+ applications. We completely overhauled our process as a result; if you’re curious, our new methodology and system are detailed in this story.
A pre-event social to encourage team formation
Hackathons typically run team formation sessions right after opening ceremony, but we wanted to help more hackers hit the ground running on Saturday. Our team hosted a casual social at UBC on Tues Jan 9, welcoming all hackers on a first-come-first-serve basis (first 100 RSVPs) but explicitly inviting those that would have otherwise been attending solo. In short, tech Jeopardy was played, pizza was consumed, good times were had 🙋🍕💖
Flight reimbursements (at long last!)
Another major reason why 2018 was a big year for us: having the financial capacity to provide travel reimbursements for the first time allowed us to finally “grow out” of our status as a local event, and fully into our proud and true pseudo-tagline, western Canada’s largest hackathon. We welcomed hackers from all over the continent — from nearby Edmonton and Seattle to as far as Montréal, Atlanta, and Mexico City.
NFC tags for event metrics
We thought it’d be handy to collect quantitative data, like # of hacker check-ins and meals served, in a way that allowed for easy post-event analysis. Our nametag-and-Sharpie solution from last year (which had been a marked improvement [pun unintended!] from our haphazard wristband-and-Sharpie setup in 2016) just wasn’t going to cut it. One of our developers Cham spearheaded the development of the whole project, from creating requirements to building and then finessing the Android app used by organizers to scan hacker nametags. And then he wrote about it.
And lots more
HelloSign instead of paper waivers, Slack contests, 24-hr 3D printing (shoutout to UBC Rapid!), and this Medium publication you’re reading now, just to name a few ✨
Of course, change — however exciting or well-meaning — is always met with some degree of resistance. Over the course of the half-year, we faced our fair share of obstacles in bringing our new ideas to life.
Finding balance between growth and quality
A hackathon is first and foremost for the student attendees — at first blush, prioritizing their experience and satisfaction is a no-brainer. But no hackathon would be possible without its sponsors, mentors and judges, and volunteers, each having their own set of requirements they would like to have met. With an event that receives more interest each year, we had to balance the benefits of providing a better experience (e.g. more swag and fun activities, and healthier meals and snacks) and expanding to accommodate more hackers with not only the financial costs in mind, but also the risk of losing sight of our primary values and becoming “too corporate” in nature. At times, there were conflicts of interest with no clear or easy “happy medium” solution. You could say we found ourselves in a bit of a catch-22: we wanted to enrich the hacker experience, but doing so was, in some ways, at its expense.
Backlash and apathy
Our aforementioned new assessment system rocked some boats. We received both public and private criticism around the time acceptances were sent out, which was a first in a professional context for many of us on the team (myself included). Though we stood behind the decisions we made, it was an invaluable learning experience that inspired several soul-searching discussions of transparency, nwHacks’ core values, and our club’s place in the UBC and Lower Mainland community.
On the other hand, some of our other initiatives, such as the pre-event social, were met with an ambiguous or lukewarm response (e.g. a shortage of post-event feedback). Consequently, we challenged ourselves as a team reflecting on this project later to empathize with attendees and assess the event from an their perspective.
Making it all happen with a disproportionately small team
…of 18 UBC students (while our AMS club is 21 execs strong, some of us work on smaller on-campus events instead of nwHacks), all of whom are either in school full-time or on co-op. We ran our team like an (Agile) startup this year, but at times — more than I can count in hindsight — it felt like the real deal. There was real money to be handled, real stakeholders to work with, and very real deadlines we could not afford to miss. To say our priorities were tested would be an understatement. Whether in school, sleep, or social life, sacrifices were made across the team for this one shared goal of hosting the best event of its kind in western Canada.
2017/2018: What we learned
While nwHacks is iteratively improved each spring, 2018 was the year we really upped our ante. We set the bar high and pressured ourselves to deliver.
But with every decision deliberated upon, we found more and more that our discussions would often converge to “it depends on…” And each decision really did depend on a lot of factors. Most notably: our main goals, the practical constraints we faced, and what we valued as a team.
Takeaway no.1:
For some problems, there are no “right” answers — only different directions for different visions.
A prime example is our decision to remove the team aspect of the application, and in effect make it completely individualized. We opted for this because we wanted to admit by merit. However, this is just one of many approaches; many hackathons do consider teams, some look to fill certain quotas, and others do completely random admissions. None of these are inherently “better,” at least in any objective sense. Each is solving a not-so-well-structured problem that is unique to their team/community/circumstances.
The moral of the story: you do you. As the song goes, “ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.”
Takeaway no.2:
Be prepared for, and expect things to go wrong. And when they do, resolve the issue to the best of your ability, and then move on. When you’re running an event of this size, the odds of every delivery arriving on time, every outlet working 24/7, and every premeditated detail being realized are infinitesimal. The dirty lil’ not-so-secret secret? Most attendees either won’t notice or won’t care.
To illustrate — at nwHacks 2018, we experienced our fair share of s!@# hitting the fan:
- The UW bus took a wrong turn on Saturday morning and arrived about 2 hours later than expected.
- There was a power outage along a wall of one atrium on Sunday a few hours before projects were due.
- Due to unforeseen technical difficulties (i.e. WOOD2’s projector being out of service), we were forced to change our closing ceremony venue and redirect everyone about 15 minutes before the scheduled start time.
- The hot water tower we rented to serve tea and hot chocolate stopped working before we could even start serving said tea and hot chocolate (the greatest tragedy of all).
Would our event have been better without all those mishaps? Of course. But in the grand scheme of things… not by much.
As it turns out, the majority of the post-event MLH hacker survey responses we received didn’t mention any of those aforementioned blunders — and when they did, they didn’t make them to be half as big of a deal as we had internally. Despite our exec team perceiving more to be “going wrong” than in previous years, many attendees told us this was the best nwHacks yet. And the wonderful MLH reps who came, Kelly and Selynna, said it was one of the smoothest and least stressful hackathons they’d been to.
So we unsubscribed ourselves from our abstract, idealized notion of how the event “should have” gone, and took the time to appreciate the real nwHacks 2018 that we had brought to the community — the ultimate 24 hours of cathartic, creative chaos in the Canadian west to date.
And in that, we found so many things worth celebrating:
Our incredible venues
We were not only fortunate enough to return to LSC for our main hacking space, but also to hold our check-in and opening ceremony at the beautiful War Memorial Gym for the first time.
Santa Ono kickstarting the weekend
We were super excited to welcome our one and only bowtie-wearing president Santa to speak at opening ceremony this year!
MLH‘s continued support ❤️
For the last four years, MLH has made nwHacks possible by working closely with us organizers in the months leading up to the event to address our questions and concerns, providing the hardware that hackers can borrow to use in their projects, and running fun activities throughout the event. A special thank you to Selynna and Kelly for flying in for the weekend to offer that additional support — we appreciate you 💖
Our superb sponsors
Who supported this entire endeavour, and also went above and beyond to enrich the hacker experience. Thanks for going out of your way to help us bring this pipe dream to life once more 🌟
Waffles for one and waffles for all.
Shoutout to Pâtisserie Lebeau for sponsoring us with their amazing Belgian waffles for the third year in a row 💕
Pick-up lines as fine as these
Our favourite Slack contest, by far.
And making this happen at last.
Conclusion: Jan 13–14 was a helluva weekend, and the six months leading up to it unforgettable.
And that’s a wrap for 2018.
Yes, it’s March now. But trust me when I say we’ve been Slacking while slacking (ha), and gears are already turning for 2019. We’ve got tons of new ideas for our fifth year, like hosting a week of pre-event workshops and the possibility of organizing a smaller, beginner-focused hackathon after nwHacks. And if that’s as exciting to you as it is to us, we want to meet you!
We’re recruiting for the 2018/2019 year and have positions open in every department, which means that whether you code, design, write, teach, or talk, there’s a role on the team that plays to your strengths. So whatever your background or experience — die-hard hacker since nwHacks 2015 or tech newbie — if you’re interested in working with like-minded students to enrich the tech community and make nwHacks 2019 “your own”, apply to join our exec team at nwhacks.io/hiring! Applications are open until March 31, 11:59PM.
Thanks for reading 🤖
Questions, comments, things on your mind? Hit that Respond button. Or if you’re not a Medium user (why tho?), shoot me an email at luce@startupstorm.org 🚀
