Blogs to Blahajs: Reflecting on my First Year as Part of the Hacker Community
Having only discovered hackathons a year ago, it has been a wild, amazing ride!
Where my Love for Hackathons Began
It all began late in the Summer of 2020, after a rather uneventful few months of Zoom classes taken from my childhood bedroom. I remember it was a nice, sunny morning and I was sifting through my thousands of unread emails (mainly from my school’s CS ListServ) and I came across one promoting a virtual hackathon. I don’t know if it was the cute octopus logo or the intrigue of a ‘hackathon’ (admittedly, I did not know what a hackathon was, so scenes from spy movies flashed through my head), but I read through the email and immediately registered. That’s when the exciting, wondrous, thrilling chaos began.
The hackathon I had registered for was the ‘Own the Internet’ hackathon hosted by Sia and Namebase. Our goal, as hackers, was to build new technologies for their products, specifically decentralized web applications for Sia Skynet, and related applications for Namebase’s blockchain-based top-level domain name services. Now, if you’re not entirely sure what that means, no worries! I had no clue at the time either!
My experience in computer science up to then was largely Java-based programming in AP CS, a one-semester data structures college course (also in Java), and then a software development internship I had completed prior to starting college. Thus, going into this hackathon, I had no experience with blockchain, decentralized technologies, or even webapps! Luckily, this particular hackathon spanned a few weeks, with the first week focused mainly on learning. I attended live streams and workshops, where I learned both about these technologies in general as well as their specific applications in terms of this hackathon and the company products.
After racing up this steep learning curve, I began the process of designing, coding, and debugging. Ultimately, two weeks later, I revealed my final product: a webapp that allows users to input custom text and settings (i.e. colors) to generate a blog post that is then pushed to Sia’s Skynet. It further walks users through setting up their new blog post with a Handshake TLD. In my final product, I didn’t just focus on the function, but also on the appearance and user experience. In particular, I wanted my webapp to help users learn, just as this hackathon had given me the opportunity to learn many new technologies and techniques. To this end, I made sure to include detailed captions in my application that explain what is happening at each step along the way.
From Hacker to Organizer
Instantly falling in love with the thrill of hackathons, I decided that not only did I want to be a hacker, but I also wanted to be an organizer. While I will always jump at any chance I have to code something innovative, I wanted to help give others these same experiences, to help others have these amazing opportunities for learning new technologies, and (arguably most important) to help people just have a fun weekend! So, I joined the IvyHacks team as a sponsorship director and a member of the tech team. Working on communication and outreach efforts in terms of sponsors, I learned a lot about what goes on behind-the-scenes of a hackathon, and worked with my team members to help IvyHacks acquire the funds needed to successfully run this new, virtual hackathon with over a thousand hackers.
Hack, Hack, Hack!
It wasn’t until the end of October that I returned to hackathons as a hacker. By then, my fingers were itching for the frantic coding and my stash of tea was only growing larger. Still Zoom-ing daily from my childhood bedroom, it was the perfect opportunity to spend some time with one of my closest friends from college whom I missed being able to see everyday. After all, what is a better way to chill with your friends than trapping them on a Zoom call at 2 AM in the morning while you scroll through pages and pages of syntax, compile, and connection errors? In all seriousness though, we had a great time, and ended up learning Node.js, using it for the first time to build a web-app. We also discovered an alternative to HTML called Pug and just had to use it because of its adorable name. In the end, we created Find Change, Make Change, a civic engagement app which we submitted to Columbia’s DivHacks.
With the dreaded finals season descending quickly, I once again took a break from participating in any major hackathons (though I did complete a few coding challenges here and there). A few weeks later, as I was scrolling through DevPost (as one does) I came across Major League Hacking’s (MLH’s) Corgi Hacks — a name too cute not to necessitate participating.
After an exciting opening ceremony and browsing through many Corgi photos, I got down to work. By this time, I had a well established goal for myself for each hackathon I participated in: to learn and use a completely new-to-me technology. At CorgiHacks, I decided to go a step beyond this and learn two new technologies: Discord.js and Linode. I ended up building Corgi Bot, a friendly Corgi Discord Bot that provides memes, quippy responses based on keyword clues, and (drumroll please) the opportunity to adopt your very own virtual corgi!
That’s right, not only are you able to enjoy Corgi-themed memes and sass, but you can adopt, dress, and play with your very own Corgi! What better use is there for a Discord Bot?
And Now We’re H̶e̶r̶e̶ Blahaj
After hearing about — and meeting many coaches from — MLH, and after participating in my first “Hosted by MLH” hackathon, I wanted to learn more about this amazing organization! And that’s how I ended up here, participating in my first Local Hack Day (more like Global Hack Week?) as a proud member of the melonsquad subguild of Blahajgang.
Though it may only be Day 4, I have already learned so much, from how to build a mobile app to how to use weather data to build both data visualizations and daily routine applications! What makes LHD: Share special in my mind though, is that it has complemented these learning opportunities with a strong community. I can always count on hundreds of unread messages (particularly many yeets, memes, and blahaj love) in both the Blahajgang and the MLH discord server. There’s always someone available to answer questions, send reminders about events/challenges so we don’t miss out on points, or just hang out in the voice channels! Already there has been lots of tea times, chrome dino, and sketchful.io, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week brings!
I wrote this blog post as one of the Daily Challenges for LHD: Share (let’s go BLAHAJGANG!!!). The instructions said to ‘publish on any medium you’d like’, so I thought, what better medium than Medium?
If you’d like to see more of what I am doing at LHD: Share, I live stream a challenge a day (plus I play excellent relaxing music while I code!):
- On Sunday, I built a simple webapp from one of MLH’s starter packs
- On Monday, I built an application that uses a weather API to report clothing recommendations (in fun ASCII art of course!)
- On Tuesday, I built data visualizations in R and GIS to analyze the spread of Pigeon populations across the United States
- On Wednesday (Today), I demonstrated how to use Python to map earthquake data
Thanks for reading! I’ll be updating this post with more information as the week continues and some final takeaways (and probably some nostalgic thoughts…perhaps an adopted Blahaj?) after LHD: Share!
