MLH Local Hack Day(s) — The Midway Point

When I first looked at the schedule for the this year’s Major League Hacking Local Hack Day Hack-a-Thon, I hesitated. I was due to have surgery a couple of days into the week-long event. This left me with more questions than answers — how would surgery go, how “with it” would I be after, how would it affect my ability to finish projects?

But after giving it a little thought, I decided to approach it like I have most of the challenges of the past six months — suck it up and get it done. I came out of surgery far more lucid than I had expected so I was back watching livestreams on Twitch and communicating with my Guild on Discord about 8 hours after the procedure was done.

The Local Hack Day event is a little different than many hack-a-thons in that there is a wide variety of challenges, projects, and other ways to earn points. So instead of one big project that you work frantically to finish, there are a number of smaller projects.

One of the first that I decided to tackle was to build a website for my Guild. I had decided to join the Blahaj Gang guild… how can you resist a stuffed shark after all? The group has been kicking butt and taking names this hack-a-thon and I wanted to build a website that reflected that and was useful at the same time. So I decided to build it with three pages — a landing page that included the leaderboard, a page of important links, and a page of music. I decided to build it from scratch… no templating or pre-done css. This wound up leading to a lot of experimenting with css in the chrome inspector to get things to look the way I wanted, but ultimately I was very happy with the finished product. The website is up and running on Netlify — https://blahaj-lhd.netlify.app/index.html

With the Guild website done. it was back to Twitch livestreams and smaller challenges like this blog post. But there should be time for at least one more decent sized project before the hack-a-thon winds down.