Hackathon!

The dream team. (From left: Bryant, Jack, Kent, and me!)

I decided to join a hackathon a few weeks ago here at BYU-Idaho. There ended up being nineteen groups of four. I got into a group of freshmen that I had seen from a few of my classes. We called our group "Fresh Meat" since we were the only team that was made entirely out of freshmen. Between me, Jack, Kent, and Bryant, only Bryant and I knew how to code. The event began at 5pm yesterday.

A highlight of the project was when Bryant and I first tried to get our two pieces of code (the UI and the analytical functions) to communicate to each other, and it ran smooth like butter on the first try! We had gotten pretty far by the time they closed the building at midnight, but we decided that we would need a little more time to get the project done (we also had to create a video to showcase the app during the 24 hours). So we found a study room in an apartment complex and worked all through the night (which was allowed but discouraged for sanity reasons), split up to shower at about 5am and met back up in the Science and Technology building for the remaining 11 hours of crunch time.

Team Fresh Meat, still truckin' at 4am!

By that time, we all felt pretty sleep-deprived, but we kept pushing on anyway. We had a solid and stable version of the app by about 12pm. The next few hours were spent on finishing touches and making a demo video. We all felt so tired! But we were able to get it all submitted nearly two hours before the deadline, which to me felt almost like a risky move. But the project really was done, right? There was no going back. At about 3:30pm, we all just headed our separate ways to rest up and enjoy whatever weekend we had left. The repo for the project can be found on GitHub.