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48 Hours of Chaos and Red Bull

lifehackathoncoding

i just survived my first hackathon. i use the word "survived" deliberately.

48 hours of coding. minimal sleep. questionable decisions. a project that kind of works. i loved every minute and also never want to do it again (until the next one).

the team

four of us. found each other in the discord server the day before. our combined sleep by the end: maybe 12 hours total.

  • me: the one who jumped between tasks
  • alex: our backend person (kept things actually working)
  • priya: the only one with design sense
  • marcus: full-stack? full-chaos? unclear but essential

the idea

we built a study buddy matching app. upload your courses, get matched with people who share them, schedule study sessions. revolutionary? no. achievable in 48 hours? barely.

the timeline

hour 0: "we got this. 48 hours is so much time."

hour 8: first major pivot. our original idea was too complex. panic whiteboard session.

hour 16: things are working. sort of. the database is held together by hope.

hour 24: why did we think this was a good idea. sleep is for the weak. (i am weak.)

hour 36: second wind. or maybe delirium. hard to tell.

hour 44: feature freeze. everything that works, stays. everything that doesn't, we pretend isn't there.

hour 47: demo time. priya carries the presentation because the rest of us forgot how to human.

hour 48: we didn't win. but we finished. and it worked. mostly.

what i learned

1. scope creep is real every feature you add is a feature you have to finish. we learned this the hard way at hour 12.

2. sleep is actually important my code quality at hour 30 was... concerning. i wrote a function that did the same thing three times in different ways. in the same file.

3. teams are everything solo projects are nice but building something with people in real-time? different energy. we celebrated wins together. we panicked together. we consumed an ungodly amount of caffeine together.

4. done is better than perfect our code is not good. there are hacks. there are workarounds. there's a comment that just says "TODO: fix this mess".

but it works. and we shipped it. and that matters.

the vibe

here's the thing nobody tells you about hackathons: the project is almost secondary.

it's really about:

  • the 3am debugging sessions where everything is funny
  • the moment someone figures out that bug that's been killing you
  • the free pizza (so much pizza)
  • the feeling of building something from nothing with strangers who become friends

would i do it again?

ask me after i've slept.

(update: i slept. yes i would do it again.)

our project is on github. please don't look at the code. please.