3 Things I Learned Running a Hackathon (and other crazy things)

Carol Chen
Major League Hacking
4 min readDec 5, 2017

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0. How to write clickbait titles. See above.

  1. To start simple — it’s one of the best things you’ll ever do.

As a young person, I’m constantly told by friends, teachers, parents and mentors that the decisions I’m making right now are ones that will define my future. I can say without a doubt, that working on THacks on October 21/22 that this was one of the good decisions.

As for bad decisions, I spent the week before the Hackathon in Champaign, Illinois for the Wolfram Technology Conference to give a talk about a project. While that was a crazy awesome experience (I now preach Wolfram Technologies), the timing was awful. It was hard to prepare for my talk while stressing about the Hackathon. I came straight off my flight to U of T for thirty hours of craziness, not to mention that I had recently done three Hackathons in a row. There’s hustling, and then there’s just overwhelming yourself and not being able to do things right. I ended up not particularly proud of the talk or Hackathon projects — basically wasted time.

2. People are willing to help you.

I mentioned bad decisions — here’s another one; Not partnering with Major League Hacking. Even when you think you may not need it, you can always ask for help, because there are people who are willing to do so. MLH would’ve solved our #hardWHERE issue and helped us out with other miscellaneous things. I don’t know what the hell the team was thinking, but we were probably being ridiculous.

On the other hand, I did get help from a lot of amazing people. I had a friend from MHacks at the Hackathon to assist with volunteering. We had volunteers from the IEEE, and of course the amazing team itself. I had a friend who was willing to give me a place to crash at 4 AM, friends to save me food when I was too busy to eat. Friends to comfort me when I started crying. I had team members who had to jump in a recycling bin for ten minutes because we had too many pizza boxes. With things going wrong left and right, we were also missing judges for the end. Guess what? One of our judges brought in another person to get us through the judging process.

3. People are amazing.

When I advertise Hackathons to my friends, I always highlight the fact that one of the best parts are meeting new people. Until reading 1287 applications (and I know that number off the top of my head), I never realized that “meeting cool people” was a huge understatement. There were students in middle school interested in building something awesome. There was that one medical student who was looking to try their hand at programming. There were internationally recognized athletes, as well as people talented in fine arts or business. There were people who shared moving personal stories. The people who stood out to me most, were actually the students from local programming bootcamps —mostly adults looking for a career change.

The real eye opener I got from reading the application was where our applicants were coming from. THacks was a very peculiar Hackathon, simply for the fact that about half the participants were in high school or below, and the other half was post secondary and above. Also fun fact, our application didn’t ask for gender or race — and we had no quotas to fill.

I found that more “prestigious” schools didn’t necessarily bring a better applicant. I myself have always cared about which schools people come from, and admittedly I use that to gauge one’s skill. This was not the case at all. In fact, it was opposite in many situations. An arts student(from an arts school) outperformed a majority of U of T students in writing quality and portfolio content. Our second place team, a duo from Algoma University (read an article about their app) impressed our judges primarily due to the technical difficulty of their project.

I know this was a long section, but I cannot express how much all 350 of our participants amazed me. Sitting at the registration table, I was able to recognize people’s whose applications were so awesome that I remembered their name out of the 1287 applications. Without a doubt it was getting to know all you guys that made this Hackathon worthwhile.

3.1. Some people in this world are going to give you trouble.

See this article from Misha Larionov (and follow up posts), which introduces the issues we encountered during the Hackathon from an unbiased perspective. tl;dr, our team got scammed, Larionov got a cease and desist, turns out more people were scammed and people were reprimanded accordingly.

Don’t let that cause you to lose faith in people in any situation.

Here’s to another crazy year of doing other amazing things and making more ridiculous mistakes. Also, again I love people; If you want to chat shoot me an email at hello@carolchen.me

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