zoomTV — a story about hackathons and creative ruts
When I was in high school, I loved going to collegiate hackathons. Those 24–36 hour sprints of creativity were where I learned how to code. Sleeping under tables in college lecture halls, sucking up all the knowledge I could from other way more accomplished engineers, these were some of the highlights of my high school experience.
But it’s funny — when I came to college, where collegiate hackathons are run, hackathons lost all their luster. They became tiresome events, a weekend devoted to coding when I could be hanging out with friends at school or simply a way to get a free flight to visit a friend (sorry Treehacks). I started dismissing hackathons as a way to churn out terrible, red-bull infused code. I was in college now, if I was going to build something, I was going to build it seriously. Any side project I took up had to be an idea for a startup — the myth of the college student building the world’s next big company in their dorm room is all too present. As a result, any time I wanted to build something that wasn’t classwork, I got bogged down in the technical details. Because of my neuroticism of making sure I could scale whatever I was building, I tended to lose interest easily in projects and switch, honestly making me pretty disenfranchised with the whole process of creating.
However, in my last year of college, I decided to do another hackathon for old times sake — and I fell in love again. A few friends and I ended up building zoomTV. In short, zoomTV is a TV guide for live Zoom events. All an organizer has to do is add zoomTV’s email to an event and their Zoom event is posted on the site. Any user can then log on the page and join those events, making the site a sort of public repository for what’s going on on the internet. There’s rich search, tagging, and a bunch more. In a lot of ways, what we had ended up making was a sort of bootleg Twitch, except instead of viewer interaction being one way (streamer to viewer), it was a lobby of people. There are certainly use cases where Twitch would work better, a Zoom event of thousands of people actually saying kappa at one streamer sounds miserable, but there are definitely situations where zoomTV could shine. Take for example a virtual watch party, part of the appeal of going to a sports bar to watch a game is getting the crowd’s reactions — this is a perfect application.
Hackathons, especially this recent one I attended, rekindled my passion for creating as they made me realize that the process of building something isn’t precious. It’s not important what framework you’re using, or how many mockups you make, or how many users you’ve interviewed. What is important is that you take something from point A to point B — that you actually ship something. That’s why hackathons are so special, those 24 hours are a creative constraint that gets you going.
