Monday, June 12, 2017

So this past weekend I went to my first hackathon ever! It was hosted at Facebook, so I was really excited to get to explore a bit of Facebook’s campus as well as experience a whole night of purely coding. However, I had no idea what to expect there.

At the event before we even began coding and creating, there were guest speakers and clips for us to understand what problem we were actually trying to solve. After all, that’s the main purpose of engineering: to solve some kind of problem. Key-note panel speakers explained the issue of lack of access to education for school-aged refugee girls. Due to natural disaster or country conflicts, these students become refugees as they are forced to leave their home and move to a new area temporarily. Unsure when their lives will be back to normal and when they can return home, their education is halted and they cannot come to physical classrooms every day for an unknown period of time.

My friend and I arrived at Facebook that morning a couple of hours early. We talked with other hackers and discussed some ideas we had. Before the event, I had only brainstormed a little bit and my idea was that we could create an app that could match what a person wanted to learn depending on their age/grade and subject they were interested in with an online website that taught exactly that. My friend had an idea for a platform that could teach teachers how to teach because another issue was that when the refugee students had to move temporarily, there were plenty of volunteers but they did not have the qualifications/certificate to teach. We met with 4 other hackers who were looking for two more team members and formed a full team of 6 people. We spent a long time deciding on what we wanted to build, what main problem to address, and who our users were. We had to come up with a strong, creative idea before we could even think of how we could accomplish that (the implementation, software, and frameworks used behind).

I learned a lot about the entire process of creating a product. I really liked this Hackathon in particular because it felt so good knowing that we could actually make a difference and help refugee students. Our app would provide courses and links to websites for both students and teachers to use while they did not have access to a physical classroom/education. This really motivated us to keep working and we all felt excited and energetic to build an app that could solve this issue. For me personally, education has been such a powerful part of my life and since I really like teaching others, this app was even more important to me and I was so genuinely interested in how we could solve an issue like that and what we could do.

In terms of things I could do better next time, I learned a lot as well. For starters, I definitely overpacked. I brought a bunch of snacks (like 10 granola bars and 8 cheese crackers) and a nice small blanket for coziness/sleep. I did not end up using either. Facebook provided a pantry full of drinks, snacks, and coffee/tea to keep us awake. I ate way too much junk food and felt nauseous the morning after for about 3-5 hours. I didn’t feel good at all, but at least my teammates were still able to complete a lot of the project, and I just finished up my job of writing and creating the content for the app.

Coming in with ideas really helped, too. It gave me something to discuss with others and hear their feedback. I learned more about working in a team; we really were all in this together. We listened to each other’s ideas and built upon one another’s ideas to make them even better. We valued everyone’s input and acknowledged the strengths of one another. We divided roles depending on each other’s strengths. We had two people working on the front-end development of the app, one person on the back-end, one person designing the logo/creating the presentation/selling the product, and two people working on the content used in the app. I didn’t realize so much work went into making an app and we eventually made a working app in about 12 hours!

Hackathons are so much fun too, and going with a close friend made the entire trip less scary and intimidating. My friend and I explored Facebook during the late night whenever we had a little downtime and needed a break. The food was delicious and there were plenty of chances for cool, aesthetic photos. Also, apparently this one was one of the shorter hackathons (about 28 hours total) and there are ones that go up to 48 hours (!!). I was already so exhausted by the time I got into the car on the way home; I slept the entire way.

Although we weren’t able to win any prizes, I still had a fantastic time and had a great experience at my first hackathon. I still think our app is amazing and has so much potential if we work even more on it. I’m glad I could learn from this experience and know how to make my next hackathon even better.

Best of luck,

Anita