Hack@Brown 2019: Hackathon Experience

Now, I have had the most amazing opportunity last weekend to participate in the coveted Hack@Brown hackathon last weekend. For those who aren't familiar with what a hackathon entails, essentially it is a 24-48 hour coding marathon in which people travel from all sorts of places to come together and work on a project. What particularly attracts me to the hackathon concept is the opportunity for growth and I can confidently say that Hack@Brown perfectly embodied this characteristic. Hackathon culture has a stigma for being overly competitive and often intimidated inexperienced hackers from participating. While the challenge of thinking of and creating a project in under 24 hours can seem like a daunting task, Hack@Brown stressed a "fail big and play often" attitude which encouraged hackers to focus on having fun and enjoying the environment rather than stressing over winning a prize. They also held many development workshops and provided avenues for everyone to gain more experience. This supportive culture for growth made this experience an amazing introduction to the world of hackathons.

First of all, Brown's campus is absolutely amazing. While there are no flashy buildings and fancy architecture, you are existing in a place of such historic importance that you can't help but gawk at the intricate architecture that defines the campus. I say this because it was amazing how the campus was transformed to an organized hacking environment with the help of a few buildings. It was refreshing to notice how much work went into organizing the logistics of the hackathon and proved to be a testament to Hack@Brown's experience and conducting a successful hackathon. One concern that I had was being able to find a team of fellow hackers who would be willing to weather the storm of a 24 hour hacking spree with me, luckily Hack@Brown also had a working system in place to get those with similar experiences on teams together.

I was able to form a team who was interested in developing a web application. Our goal was to develop a web application called Health.me that allowed those in underdeveloped countries to more easily find hospitals that would best suit their needs.

We found this to be a relevant issue as healthcare is not as organized in underdeveloped countries, often leading to overflow of hospitals in which people cannot receive immediate attention. We intended to use Google Map's open sourced API to find the user's location and identify nearby places tagged with 'HEALTH' or 'HOSPITAL.' Unfortunately, our limited experience did not allow for us to complete the project in time but we were able to learn a great deal through our struggles and I was totally happy with our progress in the end.

Ultimately, Hack@Brown produced some amazing projects that I would like to feature. One team created a Hardware Hack dubbed "Who's There?" In which they created a real life knock knock joke. The user would press a button and the hand would knock on the door. A few seconds later, an automated knock knock joke would roll across the screen leading to hilarious engineered comedy.

Perhaps the most innovative project was a video chat system that rendered images in ASCII Characters. Can you even imagine what it took to create this? This was perhaps the highlight of the creations for me because you can tell this project was purely inspired by this year's theme of Hack@Brown and the creator just wanted to play with the possibility of what he could create.

Overall, Hack@Brown is fostering a hackathon culture that I would like to see other major hackathons adopt and promote. Hack@Brown is true to its mission of developing passion towards computer science in others and I cannot wait to attend it next year!

If you are interested in talking about the article or would just like to talk with me message me on LinkedIn or email me (tbrown25@nd.edu). Also tell me how you liked the article! Thank you for reading!