If you don’t know what Hack the North (HTN) is it’s Canada’s largest hackathon hosted by the University of Waterloo in which 1000 students from all over the world come to build a tech project in just 36 hours. If I got the opportunity, I would go over how amazing the experience was and what I specifically did each minute of the hackathon. But ain’t nobody got time to read a long ass blog, so I will just list some things about Hack the North!
1. On October 18th, 2014 I tweeted this:
Thinking it would be a cool idea if I attended, but the probability of me going was slim to none. But to my surprise I’d been accepted, I’d attended and here I am writing about my unbelievable experience at Hack the North. Unfortunately I did not get to meet Alexis Ohanian, but I did get to watch him drink maple syrup at the opening ceremonies. Alexis if you read this, next time you visit UW I’d really love to meet you!
2. One of the most important things that made my Hack the North experience really awesome: My HTN team. They consisted of myself, University of Waterloo CS students Alexandra Sunderland and Amber Lee as well as a biomedical engineer at Minerva University (in San Fransisco) Justine De Caires.
From Left to Right: Justine De Caires, Alexandra Sunderland, Me. Missing: Amber Lee
We made a website called Eventure Time which helps you find events based on your interests and helps you plan events with your friends. If you’re interested in the website, check it out here: http://devpost.com/software/eventuretime. For the application, I created the landing page using bootstrap (which I learned how to use in less than 36 hours, also shout out to Amber for helping me learn bootstrap) and the landing page is responsive which makes me sooo happy (i.e. if you minimize your web browser window, the layout of the page will adjust so you can still see the whole page instead of scrolling left and right to see other parts of the screen). If my team is reading this, thanks so much for making my Hack the North experience an amazing experience, without you guys I don’t know if my experience would be as awesome.
3. Let’s be real, one of the reasons I attend hackathon’s are for the free stuff. The sponsors at HTN were unreal and I got so much free stuff like Yelp mints and Google sunglasses. So shout out to the sponsors cuz YOU DA REAL MVP.
4. Speaking of sponsors here’s a story. So I attended a thirty-minute design workshop by TD Labs in DC. At the end of the workshop, they were going to have a mini-hackathon and the winner would win a new Surface Pro Laptop. I knew that I had no chance of winning because I can barely make a For loop on Javascript. I was planning to not attempt the challenge and just browse through my Twitter feed because I haven’t done that all day. Before the workshop started, I was mingling with the person who sat beside me. While I was mingling, the person running the workshop announced that in order to access the hackathon you needed an internet connection. And some people weren’t able to get an Internet connection because the Hack the North internet connection doesn’t go that far. If you use eduroam at school (like UW) you still got an internet connection, but if you don’t then you couldn’t participate in the hackathon. The person beside me did not have an internet connection, but I did. So after the person gave us some useful tips and resources for creating a design on whatever we were making, it was time for the hackathon. So I went to the website because the person beside me was looking at my screen and it would be super awkward if I didn’t. It probably didn’t seem super complex, but to me it looked super complex. It was super awkward because the person beside me was watching me not do anything but read the question 5 times to make it seem like I was doing something. I then tried to tell them that I knew nothing and they said that I probably knew more than they did. This was completely wrong as they were a computer science student and I was not. So we decided to work on the question together (which was me doing whatever they told me to do). Thankfully, before I wrote my second line of code in Javascript to try to solve it, someone else solved it. And after that I said goodbye and ran as far away from that room as I possibly could. BTW if you’re that person that helped me during that workshop, shout out to you for helping me out despite me not actually knowing anything.
5. Another important thing at HTN: volunteers and the organizers. You deserve a shout out for volunteering at a HTN at 1:00 am when you could be sleeping. Also I want to give a shout out to my friend Wendy and Yedda-Mae for the generous amount of snacks you gave me every time I visited you at the snack station. You guys rock.
6. Speaking of Food, the food was some of the best food that I’ve had at a hackathon. From poutine to 2am ice cream cones to Grab a Greek dinner the food was the bomb dot com. Great job organizers!
7. Highlight: I saw left shark at 12am
8. Last but not least is the Snapchat. Snapchat is a very important aspect of my life. Most of my snapchats were me coding at 3 am. Also they replaced all of the UW filters with HTN filters and they didn’t get rid of them until the Tuesday after. Here are some of my snapchats:
Overall it was a great experience and I’ll definitely be back next year.