My first in-person hackathon

This blog post is all about Hack Club's Assemble hackathon, and my experience at it. By the way, everything is open sourced at hackclub/assemble, check it out!

Day 1

Assemble started at 6 PM on Friday. Before the hackathon, I'd spent a day roaming around San Francisco. As the clock struck 5:30, I was on my way to Figma's office. I don't think I could describe all the emotions I was feeling- I was excited, nervous and jetlagged, but I was ready, and very excited. When I entered the building I was met by loads of other hackers, and a massive post-it note sign spelling out "HACK CLUB". I then walked over to what would be my desk for the next 42 hours, and got out my trusty Lenovo T430. After an hour of being there, we had the opening ceremony. Here we were told about everything from sleeping arragnements to a great "in-flight" video from Max Wofford. Shortly after that, I chose my teammates; Jason, Aadit and Ara (Ishan was also there for a bit too!) So, now with a great team, it was time for us to decide what we'd actually build! We had so many ideas that we eventually decided to go with a project with 6 other smaller projects built into it. After this, we then went to the (un)talent show, which was a talent show filled with some great performances! However, midway through the show, when it turned midnight, all the lights turned off. "The Organization" had taken over the power, and we needed to follow the clues left by them to find out how to turn the power back on. This was really fun, and very exciting!

Day 2

I started off day 2 at 6AM. I woke up excited and ready to code. However, before I could get to any coding, me and a few other members of the lgbtq+ channel on Hack Club decided to go to the Castro. We started off by walking up the main street just to have a look around, then we decided to visit a museum about the history of the lgbtq+ community in San Francisco and America. After that, we had some cookies from "Hot Cookie", and made our way back to Figma. Shortly after this; we were given $15 by Hack Club to spend on food, and we completed some fun challenges too. From then till 8PM, I was coding. Afterwards, we then headed to a great party. Then, I wrote more code till about 11pm, when I went upstairs to floor 6 to have some sleep!

Day 3

Day 3 started off very stressfully- this is because it was presentation day. We had to have all 6 of our projects finished and working by 9AM, where we'd present them for voting at 11AM. However, not all of them were finished; I still needed to create a webhook to get all the information from our API. This is normally a very easy task; however, I had hardly slept. So, running on about 2 hours of sleep, I had to finish the API, and start the webhook. As soon as I knew it, it was time for everyone to present their projects. I was so short on time, that as others were presenting, I was making the finishing changes to the webhook. Once we had finished presenting our project, it was time to have a look around other people's projects; I absolutely loved every single one of them that I saw! After this, we had a closing ceremony. There, Hack Club announced some amazing partnerships and projects. (Check out hackclub.com/hackathons!)

As I said before, this hackathon was absolutely amazing. It allowed me to meet so many people that I'd met online in person, build friendships for life and visit such an amazing city. So, I'd like to say a massive thank you to the entire Hack Club team for not only building such an amazing community, but also for helping inspire thousands of teenage programmers from around the globe. As well as Hack Club, I'd also like to thank everyone who attended the event, my teammates, Matthew, Lachlan, Sam and Guillermo for not only making my time at Assemble amazing, but also my time spent in San Francisco wonderful!