My First Hackathon

The hackathon. The mystical, magical place that people can't stop talking and smiling about. The elysium from which the magnificent Messenger and Tinder came from. For the longest time, I did think of hackathons as a enigma--a place that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, the tech titans of Silicon Valley, went to have fun. But I was wrong. About a week before Hacking Generation Y, a friend approached me, asking me to join a team with a variety of skills. I accepted the invitation, and together, my group brainstormed for possible ideas, eventually stumbling on a locational and traffic based reminder app. Walking into the experience, I was apprehensive as well as unsure of what value the event would have for me. The second I walked into the Nest headquarters, I had the largest paradigm shift of my life--the place was awesome! The amount of FREE food, FREE swag, and that was just the surface (hint: everything else also involved the word FREE)! Jokes aside, I found that the hacker community is the most passionate group of kids in the world--the amount of ideas, people, and resources was overwhelming! The hackathon gave me a unique opportunity to finish the project in one weekend--while most people tend to take their time with projects (as they are not locked inside a building for 36 hours), the hackathon forced us to work as fast as we could to finish the project and forced us to learn a lot of new languages and material to get our project to work. I had to learn node.JS and JQuery. Due to using a database that updates in real time (Couchbase), I had to use node.JS to work my way around the security protocols protecting the database (Couchbase is currently working on a web interface). Once the link to the database had been established, I used JQuery to get the data and process it to return to the user. This was a different experience, as I usually use PHP as my server side language. Unfortunately, Couchbase was only compatible with Javascript, hence the usage of JQuery. The amount of support and knowledge in the air made it hard to sleep! At the end of the 36 hours, my team gave a pitch of our product to our judges, and at the awards ceremony, our hard work was rewarded--we were prize winners! We'd won $1,000! As I stepped out of the building, 36 hours flashed before my eyes. Friends, food, swag, knowledge, and riches--I saw it all. I went to my first hackathon not truly understanding or believing its purpose, and emerging from the other side a wiser (and richer) man. I realize now that this is not where titans go, but where titans are born.