At around 8:00, I showed up to Montgomery High School. I was instantly astounded by the sheer wealth of the school. I had previously traveled to Frick Laboratory in Princeton University, and the campus kind of reminded me of that. Anyways, I walked in with my friend Anshuman, and we checked in and got our MontyHacks VII t-shirts. Oh yeah, we also got these really cool rubber duckies, definitely the highlight of the day. We met up with the rest of our team and went to the opening ceremony. Being completely honest, the opening presentation was a tad bit boring and repetitive, so we just had breakfast and started coding.
Basically, my team had four members. Jay, Dhruv (who also helped build Graze), Anshuman, and myself. Jay and Dhruv worked on the back-end, mainly focusing on the app.py file that ran our back-end code through Python and Flask. Anshuman and I worked on the front-end aspects of the project, which included the user interface, the graphics, and the HTML and CSS code. Basically, the front-end is what people see on a website. We used our knowledge and experience gained from Graze and were able to create a vibrant orange-looking front-end. I was pretty satisfied with the results, as we added in everything we could. You can check out our GitHub repository here and our Devpost submission here.
The issues this time around came with fitting the front-end in with the back-end of the project. We had to learn how to better utlize Flask in HTML, which sometimes errored for major and minor reasons. We also had to really convince the judges this time that a wiki builder, which was our central idea, really fit in with the theme of 'Community'. Primarliy, this was done in the project description and README.md, along with our manual presentation. Anshuman really helped out here, doing research and writing our description and report. Another fun prize that we were trying to win was the 'Best Incorporation of One Piece' prize. We basically took all the colors from the 'Mera Mera No Mi', the fire fruit in One Piece, and used them in our project named 'Blaze'. By the way, if you're wondering why we named it 'Blaze', it's because this is the second projects in the trilogy, where all projects have names rhyming with 'Graze', our breakout project.
The atmosphere of the place was pretty good. The snacks weren't free which was kind of a bummer, but the lunch and dinner was pretty good. The hackathon organizers actually managed to get a Princeton University assistant professor to come talk about programming languages, which I attended and enjoyed. They also had a Mario Kart tournament, where one of my friends got into the semi-finals.
By the time they got to see our team's presentation, we kind of did not sell our product well. Our codebase timed out due to inactivity, which cut into our time, and they didn't seem too interested on our research and how it could relate best with the hackathon theme. We still held hope though, and made sure to note our One Piece reference and the effort it took to create a project such as 'Blaze'.
In the end, we didn't win anything, but I think I took away some key details from the hackathon. For one, our idea wasn't connected enough with the theme, as almost every project that won had a volunteering theme, I think it's still okay though. You never lose unless you consider yourself defeated. We'll get them next time.
