TechTogether Miami — Achievement Unlocked: First Hackathon
Dalyla always wanted to participate in a hackathon, but either didn’t have the time, or was too nervous. It wasn’t until they received an email to attend TechTogether Miami, that they took a chance and registered!
Read below an in-depth article of Dalyla’s experience.
Why did I decide to do this?
Honestly, it started off when I noticed my roommates attending hackathons beginning fall of 2020 during Covid — that was the first time I ever heard of what a hackathon was. As I was observing their days during the hackathon, it looked so stressful but when I asked how it was, “It was very rewarding,” would be the reply back.
Since then, hackathons have always perked my interest but I never had the time to look into finding one or even attending one (I’m also usually too nervous to join these types of things) until I received an email to join TechTogether Miami from my university.
What made TechTogether Miami stand out to me was that it was a hackathon for beginners and that it was for women, trans-men, and non-binaries. As someone with the pronouns they/she, with an emphasis on they, I thought it was amazing that it included and was for all gender minorities and when I was able to go onto the Discord server- it was definitely a safe place. There was even a channel just for the LGBTQ+, it was a place of acceptance. I felt accepted.
It Begins
I was nervous; it was my first ever hackathon and competition as I had decided to try and win one of the prizes that was offered. There was also the fact that I wasn’t too proficient in coding; I knew how to read code just fine but creating something out of it was all very new to me. I’m a cybersecurity major who was more used to analyzing traffic networks and learning about malware. Luckily, my roommates who were more experienced coders accepted my invitation to form a group together (and that TechTogether involved little to no coding).
February 11 rolls around, the opening ceremony kicks off at 4PM and so do the workshops that appear after it. I, unfortunately, wasn’t able to attend the workshops since I was more focused on working on our team’s project which went through several ideas relating to finance for a chance to win the Capital One Financial Hack prize.
It was exhilarating because my roommates jokingly placed me as “project manager” since I was the one who really wanted to do this and also because of the fact that I only had three days to come up with a solid idea and put together a demo that would really sell our project.
The Project
I may not have much in-depth coding experience (I’m currently fixing that), but I did have a little hobby: art. I had dabbled with graphic design and video editing in the past, and I pride myself in having the ability to come up with concept designs pretty quickly. And so that’s what I did in our project, Capital Quest.
So, we as a team, agreed to create a grid-like board game where the player gets to answer quiz questions about credit to move forward if they get it right among many other ideas (the other ideas were too complex to get done with the time limit we had). We had tried to use Figma for a quick mock up but then we ended up using ReactJ, CSS, and HTML which was a very new and fun experience for me!
It was also stressful because I spent three days straight writing the script for the demo as well as drawing the characters in the game to the best of my capability which was worth it because guess what?
My team won the prettiest hack award.
I paused. My first hackathon and I managed to win something.
Our team didn’t even manage to put together the game correctly as it wasn’t playable.
My roommates were right:attending hackathons was very rewarding(I think I cried a little).
It Ends…
I am so glad that TechTogether Miami was my first time hackathon experience (and no it’s not because I won something). This is because it really was beginner-friendly. I noticed they even had workshops to help the attendees on learning something if they wanted to, such as introduction to Unity, Website Designing, etc. They even had relaxing game nights to help attendees take a break from hacking away — those were super fun!!! A special thank you to the team for putting it all together.
So, I would like to say: don’t be afraid of taking a chance to join a hackathon! Even if you don’t know how to code, or don’t even want to build your own project, it’s okay to fail; it’s just fun to try! There are still more things that you can experience just by attending the workshops. I definitely recommend TechTogether to anyone who wants to try.
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