Hack:Now

Monday - April 27 2020

Community; Everything you need to know about stuff going on in your locality to keep you safe and sane during these awful times.

This is the app my team and I created for hack:now. Ill attach a link to the devpost submission at the end of this post if you want to take a look at it. Right now, I'm going to talk about my experience at the hackathon

The hackathon started with Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, talking about his experiences with Apple and technology in general which was very interesting to hear about. Soon after that they introduced the sponsers of the hack and we were told to start hacking.

One things that I loved about the first hackathon that I participated and missed in this one was the energy and excitement that was in the air. Since this was a virtual hack, the same feel wasn't there but there was one advantage. In a onsite hack, there are hundreds of people, all huddled behind their computers with 50 billon stickers on the front, furiously typing away. The intimidation is real for a novice hacker such as my self. That did not happen in this hackathon.... or so I thought until people started posting pictures of all their stickers on the slack channel. *sigh*

Anyways, moving on. None of us were very fluent with android app development so what we were trying to achieve would be a challenge; lucky for us this was a 36 hour hack so we had time. We started hacking away. At around 12am, we decided to call it a day. We had finished most of the core functionality of the app and we just had to work on the UI.

The next morning, we realized that we still had to figure out how to get video calling working. Keeping with the norms of developing, we spent almost 8 hours trying to get the video call feature to work. At the end, due to the submission time rapidly approaching, we decided to piviot to another feature. We decided to implement a feature so whenever people come close or in contact with eachother, it will log the other person on the users phone and vice versa.

With the last feature and the UI completed, and one hour to go, we set about recording the video. Once the video was recorded, edited and rendered, we had around 2 minutes left to make the submission. We then realized, we didn't add the voice overlay. We figured we wouldn't have time to re-render the video with the voice recording so we submitted the video as it was. Lucky for us however, the organizers decided to extend the submission deadline by 15 minutes. We set about creating the voice recording and with 5 minutes to spare we submitted everything and were relieved that we pulled it off

After a couple of hours, the results were released. To our dismay, we didn't win anything. That did bum us out a little but we found solice in the fact that we learned a lot over these 36 hours and becamse a lot more comfortable with android app developent which will be benificial for future hacks!

So yeah, that was my experience with Hack:Now. There are many other hackathons that are happening right now and you should participate in at least one. I mean we don't really have anything better to do right now.

Devpost Link: Community

~Sanjay Pokkali