Hackathon Essay

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In a spur of the moment decision I decided to enter into the 2017 Outside Hacks Hackathon. The Hackathon centered around creating applications that would be beneficial to Outside Lands Music Festival attendees. I was attempting to make something out of nothing with a miniscule amount of hackathon experience, no project ideas and just one friend who was even wary of my decision to join. I mingled with a few participants, and heard pitches, but still failed to join a team by the start of the competition. I’d lost all hope until I ran into another eager participant who was willing to go above and behind to create something new and exciting. Our goal was simple: we wanted to find a way to connect festival attendees who had no one to go with. …show more content…

These obstacles unfortunately continued to haunt us as the competition continued. We thought we had a winning idea, but with less than 10 hours to go, and a app that was nowhere close to being complete, the rumor mill started turning. It had somehow gotten back to our team that another team was replicating our idea. I had attributed it to the open pitch fest that we had earlier in the day, but nonetheless didn’t worry. My team members leaned more towards the side of panic, and declared that we brainstorm new ideas. With time quickly slipping away and a lack of creative ideas, we embraced the competition and decided to stick to our original idea. With less than an hour to go, my team and I had successfully built something to show during the judging process. By that time, we’d been so focused on making a great product that we had completely fallen short on preparing for the actual presentation. My team decided to elect me spokeswomen of our project. With 30 minutes left until judging, I adapted and quickly scoured the internet for anything that could help me tell the backstory of our project and why it was the next big thing. I practiced on a few participants and eager onlookers to shake the nerves that I had. By the time the judges came around I had a tailored speech prepared, and was able to present with little to no

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