Day 51: Hackathon

personal

This post is going to be a bit loopy because I’m extremely exhausted from not getting enough sleep. I’m currently in the middle of doing a 2-day hackathon as part of the Hacker Fellowship and the process is taking a toll on my body and mind.

Last week, we did a 1-day hackathon where the prompt was to come up with a dating app. Honestly, these were the sorts of things that I really wasn’t looking forward to doing when I joined the fellowship — I can see how these kinds of activities can be helpful for people looking for cofounders or trying to brainstorm ideas, but for me, it largely felt like a waste of time. I’m also not a fan of working under a time crunch because it leads to shoddy work and it’s easy to not properly take care of yourself.

So I wasn’t exactly thrilled when I found out that we were doing a 2-day hackathon this week. There are major improvements I want to make to Hide Feed and Intention, and this felt like it was a distraction from that. That said, I was pretty stoked to work with the two people I’d been matched with on my team: Erica Du and Matt Condon. They are both dope so I was happy to work together with them.

The original prompt for the hackathon was to create a Chrome extension and there would be three categories for winning: Most Users, Most Revenue, and Most Investable. The winner of each category would get a Michelin star dinner and $500 in Google Ads credit. When I heard the prompt, I thought this competition was going to be ez peasy lemon squeezy because I now have a slick boilerplate project that lets me make fully-featured Chrome extensions quite easily.

But one of the fellows mentioned that it had taken them over a week to get their Chrome extension approved and so it wouldn’t work for getting users and revenue. I had always gotten my extensions approved in about 24 hours, but I didn’t know whether my approval times were unique because I’ve had my developer account for over 7 years or anything like that. The organizers quickly decided to remove the prompt and told us that we could basically make any website, app, etc. This obviously makes judging a lot more confusing because everyone gets to decide what they’re going to count as a “user” since we’re building different kinds of services.

Right off the bat, I knew that I had a great group because rather than jumping straight into coming up with ideas, we discussed what we wanted out of this hackathon. Did we want to take it seriously or try to hack it to win it? Matt mentioned that he wanted to make sure that he got enough sleep and was able to keep his workout schedule, and I concurred because I become dysfunctional without enough sleep. (Ironic because I ended up staying up until 4:30 AM working last night — whoopee.) Erica mentioned that she wanted to build something that she could be proud of instead of it being a silly throwaway. That sounded great to me, too. I didn’t want to feel like I could’ve better used my time working on my own projects like I had during the last hackathon with the dating app prompt.

Since “Most Investable” is one that’s more dependent on the judges rather than us, we decided to go for “Most Users” or “Most Revenue”. Here are some of the ideas we threw around:

  • Build a landing page that offers the three of us as a team for hire and snag a $15,000+ contract

    • Given our skillsets and background, I’m pretty confident we could actually pull this off but then we’d actually have to do the work

  • Auction off a seat for someone to dine with us at the Michelin star restaurant

We decided to try for real rather than try to hack the thing, so we started talking about different interests we have. We found two major topics that we’d all be down to work on:

  • Surveillance capitalism / data sovereignty / privacy
  • Sustainability / animal welfare

We threw around more ideas around these topics:

  • Rube Goldberg Machine of Human Suffering — show the sequence of events triggered by clicking “Buy” on Amazon
  • Animal influencers — showcase the life of a chicken as an influencer and have the audience build an emotional bond with it before the chicken’s story abruptly ends due to its slaughter
  • Cookies for cookies — have people volunteer their cookie data and get real cookies back with some private information about them on the cookie
  • Many, many more terrible and so-terrible-it’s-actually-good ideas

We spent several hours trying to find an idea that felt like “the one”, and it was a difficult process. We’d get excited about an idea like Cookies for Cookies, but couldn’t come up with a compelling enough product that we were confident in. As a forcing function to choose an idea and start working since we only had 48 hours for the hackathon, we decided to choose an idea that we were all generally happy with and pursue that if we couldn’t find anything more compelling. We were big fans of the simple yet effective visualizations on Neal Agarwal’s website and decided that the idea we would go with by default would be to build visualizations around climate change and animal welfare. I was personally very interested in building something like Neal’s Printing Money but for showing how many animals we slaughter every second.

We didn’t come up with anything better so that’s the idea we went with. At first, it felt like we were reluctantly choosing some backup idea, but when we talked about it more and actually started working on it, we all got excited about it. Erica decided to build something like Spend Bill Gates’s Money but for spending your carbon budget, and Matt decided to build a game like Universal Paperclips but for saving Mother Earth from humans. I decided to build the killed animal visualization (working name at the time: Cow Crusher).

I’m not sure when I decided to narrate the whole story of our team working together at the hackathon, but I want to speed this up a bit because I don’t think my brain can function for much longer. Basically, we worked our butts off, and we launched the first of our projects (mine) on Product Hunt last night. Since we’re on Eastern Time and products go live on 12:01 AM Pacific Time, I stayed up until 3 AM to polish my visualization and add the first comment to the Product Hunt post. I ended up working until 4:30 AM or so continuing to make tweaks and whatnot, so that’s why I feel pretty terrible right now (not to mention the snack binging and poor eating that happens during the odd hours).

Despite my body falling apart, I’m incredibly proud of my team and our work. Our visualization of animals killed, Killed for Food, was even more surprising and effective than I thought it would be. It was honestly kind of depressing working on it at times because it was shocking just how many animals are slaughtered. I thought my code had bugs because it was hard to believe what I was seeing. I’m glad to be able to work on something that I care about and sharing it with others feels much easier because it’s aligned with my values. Killed for Food was on the front page of Product Hunt all of today, and Erica and Matt are launching their products tomorrow. I’d like to write more about what it’s been like working closely with other people again after working by myself for so long, but I’ll save that for another time.