My First Hackathon: Heman Gandhi — Director of Research and Development
I first heard about hackathons when I was a senior in high school. My friend was trying to drive up to a hackathon in Montreal with 5 other people, and tried to get me to come with him. At this point, I have been programming as a hobby for two years. I did not have many projects — only an understanding of Java and Python. I was sporadically learning other languages, and the “coolest” thing I’d built was a horrendous rendition of minesweeper using Java Swing, which is how you make user interfaces in Java (would not recommend). I ended up not going because the logistics of going to a hackathon 12 hours away seemed too scary.
Eventually, another friend found a hackathon closer to home. It was Philly Codeday Spring 2016. Codeday is not like your typical collegiate hackathon — it is catered towards high school and middle school students, so it was not quite as crazy as a collegiate one. I went to that hackathon because I felt I needed to, and I had a friend going as well. Besides, it was barely more than an hour away, so it would be logistically easier to handle than going all the way to Canada.
At Codeday, my friend and I made a webapp to trade wait list spots for college classes. It was a horrible abuse of Python’s standard library, jQuery, and JSON. My friend wrote the algorithm, while I made the server. I tried picking up Flask and Django to do the server stuff, but I ended up not using either. Nevertheless, broken and crazy though it was, it worked.
Aside from the coding aspect of Codeday, it was overall just…good, casual fun. With food. A lot of food. Much more food than I expected. It was also quite friendly but among quickly-formed friend groups. The event was small enough so that people did not have to mingle. In fact, most people were locals so they just brought friends. My friend and I had travelled the most and were the only strangers to everybody else, so we formed our own small group.
There were two big things I took away from Codeday. First, I could actually manage to survive a 24 hour coding event. Second, I really wanted to learn more about hackathons, and find larger ones to attend.
After the Codeday, I went to Philly Codefest at Drexel. The hackathon itself was fine, but the group of people I ended up working with made it possibly my worst hackathon experience ever. My team was not enthusiastic to be at Codefest at all, and most of them began to work on homework. While our project worked, the process was painful. After this, I actually hated hackathons for 2 months. The concept seemed inane.
Some time after Codefest, I decided to volunteer for HackRU in the spring of 2016. I first tried to help out the sponsorship team, but I was not able to secure any sponsors on my end. However, I did find myself around like-minded CS people and got more involved in the CS community as a result. There was also this strange beauty to this apparent war among hackathon organizers, sanity, and their college’s bureaucracy. It was fun to see people come together to make an awesome event and propagate a fun and exciting community. Being a part of the hackathon organizing process made me fall back in love with hackathons.
If I could have another first hackathon, I’d definitely do a little more research on events beforehand and would be sure to know at least one person there. Definitely try and get your friends to come along, even if they (or you) are not in computer science. That way you all can experience one together, and it makes the first hackathon experience a little less intimidating. Plus, you can all work on a project and learn something cool. Also get to know some hackathon veterans and mentors. Most people will be willing to answer any questions you may have — before and during the event. Especially mentors. They signed up to mentor because they want to help you out.
And if a veteran or any person invites you to a hackathon, don’t ignore their invites. Just go and try one out!
Heman Gandhi is the Director of Research and Development for HackRU XII. He is a sophomore at Rutgers University, double-majoring in math and computer science. He has lived in Japan for 6 years and is fluent in Japanese. He also likes Lisp. A lot.
