The beginning of my hackathon journey

I was always fascinated by technology and art when I was a kid. I started my coding journey at the age of 12 by doing a simple “Hello World” pop up window with Visual Basic. Later on I found out that coding was not really my thing entirely but drawing and designing. So, I decided to combined both design and coding together which is now widely known as front-end development (software development on the visual side of a program).

I continue my front-end development by doing web design and coding together in my college days and met a lot of talented people whose coding skills have already surpass some adult software engineers. From then, I started to join tech communities in university and some by other software development companies.

I participated my first hackathon back in April 2017, it was the NASA Space App Challenge. I have always love things about Space and rockets so when I saw a Facebook post about I immediately sign myself up. Then, I start to recruit team members to join me but in the same time I do not want to have the people (like friends that I knew for 2 years and above)to team up with me so I wrote an Facebook post on my feed to ask for people that I newly met at some tech conferences to attract them to join me. Gladly, I have found 2 friends from the post and another 2 introduce by them. Now we are good to go!!!

There was a pre-event brief just a week and a day before the actual event. So I went to the briefing. To my amazement, I was the earliest to arrived (maybe too early because I arrived an hour before the briefing starts) I network around and make some new friends and prepare for the next day.

We arrived early as well and we were thrilled to see so many people had already arrived. The space was packed and we cannot really move. The opening ceremony starts and as usual we have high profile people giving speeches. The one thing I will always remember from that opening was the speech by Vice Japan Ambassador of Malaysia because he present almost half his speech in Malay language and I even felt he speaks better in Malay than his native Japanese. Everyone was in awe the moment he starts speaking. After the ceremony, everyone get to their spaces and starts ideating. Let the hackathon begins!

We got a table and set our laptops up and start researching. Mentors from various industries like from agriculture to A.I. are walking around seeking teams to mentor. We discuss and pitch to mentors and got interesting feedbacks from them. The mentors are very helpful to be honest that is one of the best thing about joining hackathons you can get honest and fruitful advices from them. After consulting several mentors and researching 3 hours we decided to switch our work station. Some people are leaving the venue because they are not enough power outlets and the Internet connection was very slow (something which I later addressed in their feedback form). So now we need to think of a place to stay for a night and with good Internet connection speed.

Luckily, I have an empty apartment nearby with good Internet connection. We travelled there at night. We ate dinner and continue to work on our idea. After hours of ideation and sketching we still cannot produce an results. We were very tired and decided to set aside and have some rest. Some of us decided to play some video games (Overwatch) and some of us sang songs to relieve our stress. Though tired but fun.

There were 3 judging stages to select the top teams out of 300 teams. We spent 24 hours coming out an idea and try to finish it within the timeframe but we struggled on the ideation part and were eliminated in the first stages of judging because our idea was not solid enough and have no clear pictures and models to show the judges. We did not stay for the event as all of us was worn out and decided to go back home and have some sleep.

It was an eye opening experience to see so many software engineers and university students come together and build software. It was really fun and I learnt a lot from it. Although it was only a ideathon there was a true hackathon going on at the same time so I got to see some work and presentation done by other hackers and I learnt from it.

After NASA Space Apps I gathered my knowledge and continue to participate later hackathons which were the AT&T, FACE 2017(Face Recognition Hackathon). I manage to get third place in one of those hackathons. I will share more stories on tech and maybe my forte design in the future. Stay Tuned!

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