Hacking All My Fears Away at TechTogether New York 2020
“I can’t do this.”
“I will never be able to make it through the weekend and hack away.”
“I am not cool enough to be a hacker.”
“I have a million submissions due the week of the hackathon and the week after, I can’t attend :’(“
“I don’t have a team and I can’t work on this alone. I am also too shy to meet new people, maybe I should drop out?”
“I am too old to participate in hackathons.”
This is what I felt about hackathons leading up to the event. TechTogether New York 2021 completely changed my perspective.
Forming a Team
The event was to be on 4th December 2020 and I joined the discord a couple of days earlier. The first thing I learned about navigating virtual hackathons is how to form a team. I started the event without a team, so I had to figure out how to form a team for the weekend. I did this by introducing myself in the #team-formation channel on the Discord. I also messaged some people directly to see if they wanted to form a team. Before I knew it we had a group of 6 people. That is how my team’s journey at the hackathon began.
Planning out the Hack
A detailed ideation phase is a very important factor for any project/hack. It is important we plan out exactly what we wanted to achieve over the weekend. This was tough and after some brainstorming, we decided on our functionality for the app which we named Uplift. But we had to cut down some of the functionality so that we could finish our app.
We ended up keeping the features that were critical to the essence of our idea and those that we could finish coding by the end of the weekend.
Picking our Tech Stack
Next, we decided on the tech we were going to use to build our app. After that, we started prototyping the application using Figma. One of the amazing things about hackathons is that when you didn’t know a particular tool, you could either express interest and learn it or focus on other tasks and lean on your team to do it. Either way, there would be no judgment. I decided that I didn’t want to develop my design skills, so I didn’t contribute to the prototype. Instead, a few of us started to work on collecting data for our app while the others worked on prototyping.
Building our App, Uplift
Every single detail matters, that is what my team taught me the most. I was a bit taken aback when I saw how determined my team was and how they took ownership of their various tasks such as prototyping, coding, data collection, and creating the pitch for Uplift. Once the UI of Uplift was completed, we moved on to work on the interactivity of the app. This was my first time staying up late and working on a hack along with my team for a hackathon. This was an experience I always wanted to have at a hackathon and it was very exciting!!
A Safe and Supportive Atmosphere
Throughout the hacking process, may it be 3 AM or 3 PM, the discord was always alive — buzzing with messages from organizers, participants, drool-worthy pictures of food, cute Octocats and Bytes, our adorable furry friends, and much more! Even when we hit roadblocks in developing some of our functionality, the mentors were always available to help us. The entire atmosphere was safe and exciting. The event had the same thrill of being at an in-person hackathon.
Finishing our Project
On Sunday morning, we finished implementing Uplift (all went according to plan!). We then chose a domain name and deployed our site from repl! Yay!
Then came the most important part of the weekend, submitting the project on Devpost. Some of my team members had already started working on it and we all started making minor modifications to the Devpost content while one of us worked on the demo video. The way an app is presented/pitched in the demo and on Devpost shows the judges our motivation behind creating the app, the functionality we were able to implement, and the future of the app. We also had to carefully choose which categories our hack would classify as for the submission. Finally, we updated our Devpost submission after one last inspection of the content, and with 30 minutes to spare before the initial submission deadline, my team and I took deep breaths and just chilled.
The Closing Ceremony and Wrap Up
At the end of the day, we all joined in for the closing ceremony and to our surprise, we heard from Soumya on the live stream that Uplift won in the best Ed-Tech hack category!! We were extremely thankful to the entire team for rewarding our hard work with such appreciation and ended the day with happiness and smiles.
I am truly so glad to have met such an amazing team of folks I could bank on, and to have found a space that was so warm and welcoming. I look forward to attending TechTogether Seattle this January along with my team! See you there!
PS - Here are a few snapshots of our app!
For more, check out Uplift here!
