My first hackathon (MLH Launch Hack)
Last weekend I attended Launch Hack, a hackathon for students organised by MLG. This was the first hackathon I have ever attended and it was a fantastic experience. My two friends Nali and Ivaylo joined me and together we were to build a project in 24 hours. We also recruited a fourth team member called Ong Cher Wei from Glasgow.
While Nali remarked he was going to attend it to learn from other people and enjoy complimentary food and drinks, I was determined to make the 24 hours worthwhile. We came up with the idea to build an web application, since our most combined programming expertise was in PHP. I thought that we should solve a problem that has been on the internet since its launch: Broken links.
We all know what it's like to want to see a video that has been shared numerous times on the internet, only to be disappointed to find out its deleted. Well what our application would do is to use reddit to search for mirrors. The reason for that is, that in the comments, the users are always keen to provide mirror links to other users for karma (upvotes).
Well since I have had expertise with the Reddit API (with x-posting and r/delay) a very basic prototype of this web-app should be no problem. Since I had the most experience out of our entire group and came up with the idea, I was called to be the leader.
In the beginning, I had the task to not only start coding the base, but to also assign things to do to my team-members. One of them, Ivaylo, had done some php in the past so I thought of giving him the task to connect the reddit api to our app. On Cher only had experience in Visual Basic, so he his task was to build an html template which we could serve the information on.
Unfortunately, one hour into the hackathon, my HP laptop broke down and refused to start up again. This was captured by the organisers and put on twitter.
After we shared a few laughs, Nali graciously offered me his macbook so that we could actually get some work done. He went on to assist On Cher with the task of building the html template and researching more of how we could get other sources of mirror sites.
Around 5 hours in, we had built a basic file structure and the html template was looking great. Unfortunately, the heart of the whole web-app, the reddit integration, was not looking so well and it set us back by about 4 hours. During these 4 hours we were frustratedly wondering why reddit kept wanting to for us to log in and allow permissions. After figuring out what we wanted was the basic mode instead of the oauth mode and some tinkering, we finally managed to get it running.
After that, I took over integrating the reddit api into our project, while Ivaylo had the task of handling broken links which were not submitted to reddit. This process was tedious as I had to parse my way through all the arrays and stdobjects in php to get to what we really wanted: the comments.
In between working we had a good time eating delicious food and drinks catered by Bloomberg and occasionally playing New Super Mario Bros for Wii U. The presentation room was changed into the sleeping room at night and I had a comfortable good sleep, even though it was only for two hours.
The next morning we did all the finishing touches to the web-app and we were surprised and delighted to see it actually working. When it came to the presenting, me and Ivaylo were to present about how our application worked in 2 minutes time. We were incredibly nervous, but we managed to do a pretty good job. The presentation can be viewed here, but please keep in mind that we only had 2 hours of sleep in the past 2 days.
In conclusion, this hackathon was one of the best experiences in my life so far, and even though we didn't manage to win any prizes, we received a goodybag containing some pretty awesome swag!
