I had the good fortune of being one of the 850 chosen applicants out of 2150 to attend NwHacks 2018, the largest hackathon in western Canada! The event took place on January 13th and 14th and featured coders from as far south as California and across Canada in attendance. We could work in teams of up to 5 people and we had 24 hours to produce a tech solution. I say tech because you could use raspberry pis, VR headsets, Qualcomm Boards, Arduinos, and whatever else you wanted as long as it was electronic and coding was involved.
There was no overall theme, but the sponsors had themes they were offering prizes for. There were tech prizes, and membership prizes, and cash prizes, Nintendo Switches, gift cards, Raspberry Pi's, and lots more! The sponsors had booths set up, gave out swag, one sponsor had a TV with a N64 and Smash Bros hooked up for attendees to play. Scotiabank had a cup stacking game set up and a giant Jenga set. Attendees stayed at the event overnight, and at 3AM they had a Piñata bash. Food was served, mini-contests were held over slack and it was overall a really good time.
You can read more about the contest here, and you can see the submissions here.
I didn't win anything, unfortunately, but I did get some takeaways, mostly as they pertain to competing in hackathons (in no particular order):
1) Use APIs and 3rd party libraries
Everybody there used some 3rd party library or interface and it made their projects so much better. Learn to use them and use them.
2) Have a plan
There were a good number of projects there that I have trouble believing were completely assembled in 24 hours. I'm not saying I should have memorized my entire project beforehand then assembled it on site, but I should have had an idea about what I wanted to build and considered the flow of it, what API's I'd want to use, and so on. I went in with only a minor plan (which I didn't use as I ended up following my teams plan anyway).
3) Sit in the main hall (unless you absolutely can't focus)
My team elected to move to a quieter area in another building, and while that was great for focus, I feel like we missed out on the fun and chaos of the main hall. It's packed, yes, but there's so much else going on you really feel like part of the coder community.
4) Don't spend so much time planning at the event
Another mistake we made was spending too much time during the planning phase. Nearly the entire first day was spent just coming up with a problem to solve and defining scope. This ties in with the idea to have a plan BEFORE you come, then fully flesh it out on site. I think coding anything before coming is cheating, but coming up with flowcharts and learning HOW to code a project (as in, learning 3rd party APIs, libraries, and languages) is fine. As long as the actual building occurres on-site.
5) Choose the prize you want to win and build a project around the theme of that prize.
So, for example, one company was giving away prizes for the best Social Hack. That's a theme. Another one was giving away prizes for the best Accessibility Hack, another for best banking app, and so on. Since the hackathon didn't have an overall theme, picking a sponsors theme will help you narrow down your focus.
6) Try something new
Unless you're really intent on ensuring you win a prize, I recommend trying something new. I unfortunately used the same knowledge I used in my previous hackathon and feel I missed out because of it. The sponsors at NwHacks held information sessions about using their products and APIs and I wish I attended them. Don't make my mistake, try a new database system, try a new API. You'll come away with new ideas and feeling better about your knowledge base.
Overall it was a really great experience and probably the first time I felt like I really belonged to part of a group. I loaded up on SWAG, participated in the contests, and although I didn't win anything (seriously, nothing, not even a cinnamon bun!), but I definitely want to try again next year.
True to their word, Apple got back to me within 3 days and told me to try submitting the tax form again in 2 business days. I did, and it went through and my apps are back up. They're all free for now too!
Unfortunately, my apps have been pulled from the app store while I sort out the US tax agreement.
I released the apps while I was living in the states, and since moving back to Canada I've had to move my Apple Developer account back to Canada too. This went smoothly except for the US tax agreement, which iTunes isn't letting me complete due to "An account with that name and social security number" already existing.
I'm working to sort it out, and this couldn't have happened at a worse time, but here we are.
On December 3rd, I attended my first Hackathon. It was organized by BCIT and ran from 9:00 AM on January 3rd, to 2 pm on January 4th. We were put into randomly assigned groups of 5 students and given a theme to produce a solution for. The theme was "As a BCIT Student I want _____, so that ______".
My teams solution was "As a BCIT Student I want a more useful and mobile ready MyBCIT homepage, so that I can access the site on my phone and have access to more useful information."
The MyBCIT website is one of the 3 sites we use as students, but it's the main site we use to get our course schedules, pay our tuition, and email our professors, among many other tasks. Unfortunately, it's not mobile ready, the course schedule is about 4 links deep from the home page, the search doesn't work (it takes you to another search engine where you have to re-enter the search terms again), and the campus map isn't very useful. We sought to produce a vision of what this website could be.
One of our goals was to integrate a useful course calendar onto the main page. We wanted it to show the current days schedule on mobile, and a week on any larger screen size. As we did not know how to link to the built-in calendar or student course data, we used Google Calendar to simulate what we envisioned.
The second main goal was to integrate a campus map onto the Campus Life page. BCIT has a clunky but useful campus map here. We tried embed it using an iFrame, but the permissions on the page wouldn't allow us to, so we just put a placeholder pdf map.
The final goal was to style the pages like the rest of the BCIT website (grey, blue, white, and black), and make it fit neatly on a mobile screen, which we accomplished.
There were some areas of the original website that we didn't have the time or knowledge to rework (like the groups, email, and help sections), but we felt that our main goal was accomplished. The site even has a working login page (for a fake student).
To build the site we used HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, PHP, and a bit of jQuery. We didn't face any major challenges, just a few hiccups like getting the login to work, and getting the calendar to resize depending on the screen size. In the end, we were happy with what we produced.
