I went to my first Hackathon, and it was surprisingly a super positive experience. I highly suggest going to one; because if you were like me, you’d think Hackathons are overrated, hyped up events that will drown you in free stickers. And you’d right, but the real thrill of Hackathon is teaming up with strangers to tackle an ambitious project. I went to this Hackathon expecting to organise my github repo and attend talks, but instead I joined a team and made a web app that grabbed course data from Universities and automatically generated schedules.
The thrill of working furiously under an impending deadline, in our case 12 hours, is the exhilarating part of Hackathons. Ordinarily you’d code something within your skill to do, and at a comfortable pace – which is boring. As a game developer, I don’t know much about web development, but I designed the entire front end of this project in HTML and CSS from scratch! Being pushed to create something that, just the day before I would’ve thought “no way could I do that”, has been the most accomplished I’ve felt in a long time. Crunching code and chugging red bulls, with the competitive fire to outdo other teams, surrounded by newly made friends, is what makes Hackathons great.