Hello Readers, thanks for being here :)
There are plenty of ways to spend your weekend. The third week of January I spent mine staying up coding a project for a hackathon. This was actually my second hackathon, my first was back in 2013. I participated in CUNY Hackathon 2021, and I really pushed myself. I usually work alone as a freelancer and haven’t worked on a team since my internship in 2018, [The relationships being more mentor like than peers.]. It was my first time working with peers much less people I’d just met! Stretching my social-ness and getting over the fear of something new was a big step in of itself. My team and I quickly began brainstorming ideas days before hack time was scheduled and actually ended up executing my idea.
I came up with the idea for a “Charity Clock” in high school but throughout the hackathon, the idea was augmented to fit our purposes. I struggle a lot with waking up on time and through the pandemic it has only gotten worse (bad circadian rhythm, being less active, not going out as much). The point of this app was to motivate me to get out of bed. Time in this app will literally cost you. Alternatively, on the flip side, if I did sleep in, I would feel less bad because I am donating to an organization or charity I care about and trust to do good work. We settled on the name PenniezZZ.
Unfortunately hackathons are a short period and we did not get to finish in time. I still had an amazing time meeting new people and learning from my teammates. As mentioned before, I normally work alone, which means my git repo is just me, it’s easy to scrap and create a new repo when a mistake is made. This experience taught me so much about how important version control is and so many new git commands that are super useful. Learning how to navigate git in a new way was invigorating. I have had the goal of going to a 1 hackathon per semester for a couple of years and this is actually the first time I’ve actually done it. The pandemic actually made it so I had no excuses, as it was moved online. The barriers of transportation, food, and time were all taken away. This hackathon was also free to participate in so that helped! Even though the hackathon is over, one teammate and I continued to work on he PenniezZZ app, but eventually they had other responsibilites that came first. Below you’ll find the DevPost submission, a link to my fork of the github repo (where you can watch my progress as I finish it in my spare time) and a video demo of the unfinished app. I have actually already signed up for another hackathon hosted by MLH who sponsored CUNYHackathon, so stay tuned!
The Devpost Submission.
The Video Demo:
The forked Repo. I will post another blog update when there is more to tell.
As always thank you for reading! Comment below something you are looking forward to this summer.