Houston Mini Hackathon

First Mini-Hackathon Lessons

Aspen, a Digitalcrafts graduate, organized a mini hackathon. Their slogan is: the hackathon for busy people. Cool idea, right? I’ve only ever been to 24hr hackathons; they’re super fun. Every time I attend one I get so inspired by the energy of the collaboration. The rush of motivation trickles throughout the month depending on if the team wants to continue the project. I’ve learned a few things:

So a mini hackathon is the size of a regular work day — what can we do in 8 hours? The night before, I drew up some ideas. I didn’t want to go in without any preparation —been there, done that, that’s for newbs! I decided on one project that I could pump out in 8 hours if I worked in a team of 2.

Potential project: I would build an image recognition alt-tag generator. It’ll be built with Microsoft image recognition API, Amazon S3 storage, and with NodeJS Express framework. In one click, a user can upload multiple images to S3, it generates a URI that gets passed to the API. API returns a string of a sentence that describes the image. The string is passed back to the uri which updates into S3.

It was simple, I already had the component features working separately together. All I had to do was mash it up in 8 hours.

When I went into the mini-hackfest, I felt prepared.

Lo and behold, none of what I planned happened.

The Solution

That’s what I’ve learned and I’m better prepared for the next mini-hackathon!

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Software Engineer — Blockchain, Cybersecurity, and Commercial Space

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Juliana Mei

Software Engineer — Blockchain, Cybersecurity, and Commercial Space