My First Hackathon: Brandon Yu — Executive Director
I didn’t program at my first hackathon, but the experience was totally worth it.
It was 2014 — my junior year of high school. I was taking AP Computer Science at my school, the first time they’ve ever offered it. Before this, I programmed a robot to move around for a class and tried to learn Python, but I didn’t have too much experience with programming yet.
Earlier in the year, one of my friends went to MHacks at the University of Michigan, which was a 10 hour bus ride away. The bus ride alone seemed crazy to me, although the event sounded like fun. Months later, he tells me about an upcoming event called CodeDay, where people can come to work on a project for 24 hours (CodeDay is not officially labeled as a hackathon, but I consider it one).
CodeDay happens in multiple cities all on the same day and there was one happening right near me in New York City. So me and some friends decided we’d go. I’ve never been to an event like this, and I was told there’d be free food and stuff. And I figured I could probably practice programming or learn something new while I’m there.
On the morning of the event, all of my friends met at the train station. We arrive at the city, then the venue; we find a little room to ourselves, and we figure out what to do. One of my team members had experience with iOS development, so we decided to build an iOS game. The game was going to have a wizards and magic theme where the player would fight enemies real time by using swiping gestures on screen to attack and dodge. Since I only knew some Java mostly, I wasn’t going to be of much help for an iOS app, although we needed someone to do the art which I didn’t mind since I liked doing artwork. We wanted a pixel-ly video game feel to our game so I installed GIMP, learned how to use it and worked to create pixel art and to pixelate pictures of ourselves that we were putting into the game as avatars.
Throughout the event, I enjoyed the free meals, free shirts and stickers, meeting some new people, and exploring the city when we had time. Since this was a 24 hour event, I took that as a challenge to stay up throughout it all. So I did. Watching the sun rise in NYC was my trophy for that.
By the end of the hackathon, my team had a rough, but working game, filled with my amateur attempt at pixel art. We didn’t win or anything, but it was fine because we all had fun. During that CodeDay NY, I had learned more about graphics software and digital art, which I still deal with today.
My first hackathon wasn’t the best hackathon I’ve been to, but it was enough to get me hooked. The experience of traveling to the event with friends, the people, the free things, the 24 hours of memories, the potential to better yourself or learn. All of these things from one weekend. It was without a doubt that I would go to more of these events. In fact, over the next few years, I went on to attend about 25 hackathons, far and near me (I had to take a 2AM bus once for a 9 hour bus ride, that was fun). I ended up helping organize for CodeDay and many other hackathons in the area, before I came to Rutgers to organize HackRU.
Hackathons have really shaped me to be the person I am today. The experiences that I’ve had from hackathons allowed me to improve myself in almost every aspect of my life because they introduced me to things I might not have imagined doing.
If you’re new to hackathons or have never been to one, let me just say that it’s worth it. If you don’t have much experience with coding, that’s fine. You can still learn about or enjoy the experience during the time you’re at a hackathon. If it weren’t for hackathons, I’d be a completely different person today.
Hackathons may change your life too.
Brandon Yu is the Executive Director of HackRU XII. He is a sophomore at Rutgers University, majoring in computer science. He used to play ultimate frisbee, and he enjoys long boarding around campus.
