NUS Hack&Roll 2023 💻

Written by @admin1 on Sun Jan 15 2023 05:57:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Summary of NUS Hack&Roll 2023:

I had the privilege of attending my first physical hackathon - NUS Hack&Roll 2023 last Saturday. NUS Hack&Roll hackathon receives an overwhelmingly amount of applications every year (demand > supply), hence the organizing committee has to review applications and do some filtering to select applicants. I was pretty stoked when I received the acceptance email from them :).

The first day of the hackathon I was mainly involved in attending the various engagement sessions by the various tech companies (who sponsored the event). Essentially the hackathon felt like a mini-recruitment event for all the uni/poly students present at the hackathon. In total this year, there were a total of 580 participants at the event, so I guess there would be alot of talents for the companies to scout for. Each tech company/sponsor also was given their own booth - which had various swag that participants can take. I also interacted with various participants of the hackathon, and also got the chance to speak to some interesting representatives/software engineers at their respective booths, and learnt more about their company's culture & tech stack etc.

Besides the engagement sessions, I was also trying to think of various suitable ideas as my hackathon project. As I was a one man team, and didn't have much hackathon experience, I wanted to keep the scope small (and demo a workable product at least). 24 hours might seem like a long time, but time flies by extremely fast at a hackathon, especially due to endless amounts of time spent on debugging your code on the computer.

Nonetheless, eventually inspiration struck at 12am where I finally decided to create a desktop cat companion which also acted as a eye-straining prevention tool called PyCat.exe. When the program is executed, it basically generates a desktop pet at the bottom of the screen, and "reminds" you to stop staring at your screen every 20minutes & look at somewhere far instead for 20 seconds (thus preventing eye strain problems). For more details, you can refer to the GitHub link and DevPost link below.

The entire process from ideation, development, to debugging & testing all took around 8 hours. From 12am - 8am, I basically coded, fixed many bugs, checked documentation on why things didn't work. It was tiring as I wanted to sleep, but I couldn't do so or else I wouldn't have a workable demo by the judge presentation in the afternoon. Thankfully, managed to resolve the issues at hand, and had a successful and good demo to my judge 😀 at the end of the day.

I learnt many things during this hackathon. The main takeaway from this experience was to remain persistent and persevere till the end :)

Overall, a very good and fun experience! Hopefully, would be able to attend again (next time with friends who are interested to hack things up in a 24 hour hackathon)

Photos on 14th Jan 2023: uploaded image