World's Shortest Hackathon

January 17th, 2025 (17 days ago) • 3 minutes

coding while we are walking

p.s see below for things I learned from joining so many hackathons.

Joined the World's Shortest Hackathon today, 2 hours of coding.

The prizes are amazing - they are giving away 2 4090 GPUs signed by Jensen Huang himself.

I went there earlier and met a lot of undergraduate students from across the country who are participating in the hackathon. Some flew all the way from Montana and even Wichita.

Made a few new friends.

The food was good; it was catered from Chipotle, so quality was guaranteed. They also had pizza later in the night.

The Wi-Fi was bad, so we headed over to USF's campus to work since it's only a 5-minute walk.

I had an idea to try to address bias on Wikipedia by capturing and then showing users where the bias is. Think of it as the Community Note for the Web. I called it Chronicle. At the end, we pivoted to a more general one using Exa to pull news sources from the web, Twitter, and Reddit, then compare that to the Top 5 news today.

V0 was bad today somehow 🥲 So we depended on Claude for UI, and safe to say it disappointed us. Not too sure why V0 didn't perform well even though we had premium...

We ended up still demoing it, so I was proud of that. At least we completed it.

We didn't win, but the finalists were amazing. Someone built a video analyzer to detect mitochondria directly from his microscope, another built a puppeteer on top of V0 to prompt it to build slides. Another one built an entire game based on the theme of Pokémon (but with a twist that the Pokémon are real-life objects that you scan with your camera, then it's enhanced into a cute character).

Adrian built a video generator for educational content and made it to the finals. I came up with the conclusion that the next hackathon, we should focus on Adrian's idea and build on top of that. He had been on a streak.

Some things that I figured out from joining so many hackathons:

A really nice frontend matters!!!!! (This over the others)
Nobody cares if you hardcode
Leave pitching and demoing to a person who can speak well
Just use AI
Ask the mentors for what they want to see in the hackathon and build that
Projects based on hardware, i.e., robots, microscopes, etc., usually make it to the finals
Do something simple but fun! Don't treat it as if you are building a whole startup.