Eduhacks 2017: Down the Hacker Rabbit Hole
- 8 mins rab·bit hole
noun
Used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.
I’ve never been accused of substance abuse. Unless you’d consider hundred milligrams worth of caffeine doused in one’s bloodstream a form of overdose.
A feeling of such high is difficult to come by. Yet is one that perfectly describes my experience at Eduhacks 2017; the first of many 24-hour hackathons I would attend during my time as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia. In retrospect, it’s difficult to justify why I’d choose to spend my weekends holed up indoors, despite being situated in the heart of bright and beautiful British Columbia. This event being my first, I certainly wasn’t expecting to win anything. What ultimately convinced me was the prospect of gaining experience outside the classroom. Plus, I really wanted to add to my laptop sticker collection.
However, due to a mixture of ineffective communication and bad ‘economic’ planning, the team-of-five I assembled beforehand never showed up. No longer protected by the in-group homogeneity bubble, I was wrought with uncertainty. Being surrounded by far more experienced hackers in filled teams and ready-made ideas left me more vulnerable to imposter syndrome more than ever. Metaphorically, in this instance the ground beneath my feet began to sink, and there began my descent down the rabbit hole.
Team Building Without Autofill Parity
The first hour of the plunge down is typically defined by inexperience. In my case, that inexperience perfectly partnered my underqualifications. I came from a background satiated with individual competition designed to bring the most out of every person. Competing in inter-state badminton competitions made me understand that in some cases you are the better player and in some cases your opponent is just stronger.
What I wish I knew at the time was at a hackathon - learning is it’s very core activity. Competition will always be binary. But for more than 24 hours, we have the chance to teach others what has been taught to us, and for the more experienced to provide a helping hand to those of us in need of one. Hackathons are breeding grounds for talented people of diverse backgrounds. And even though the process of working with strangers instead of friends may be initially daunting, it presents a rare opportunity. Even if you don’t know how to code - you get to participate in a dialogue where initially alien concepts, new programming languages, and courtesy is shared and practiced. For me, the wonders of the development process is exemplified by conversation and honest feedback - by some of the most talented people I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
Image Quality: Impoverished
It just so happened, on that fateful day, I was introduced to four of them - an educator, an artist, two developers. Armed with a melting pot of ideas, it was go time.
Down the rabbit hole
T-minus 24:00: Inexperience paralysis
Lua. Words cannot describe how I felt when my gaze fell upon its nonsensical jargon. Up to this point, I had only a pinch of experience with coding in Python and the grotesque syntax of Dr Racket. Our initial idea using Lua was to create a game with a similar programming stack to our teammate/lead developer Trevin’s paper_cut project, which had seen its share of praise in a prior hackathon. The only problem was, both my friend and I couldn’t code in Lua. And despite our best attempts to reverse engineer pre-existing code from template projects, there was no way we were going to build anything authentic or substantial in 24 hours. It was a horrifying feeling - feeling both useless and stupid and unable to contribute to your team. Eventually, after spending close to five consecutive hours on “coding”, Trevin finally reconsidered using RPG maker instead, where scripting was powered by JavaScript. When we went finally down for lunch at 4pm in the afternoon, I can assure you my sushi has never tasted sweeter.
T-minus 12:00: Learn fast or die slow
By midnight, we had already made up for lost time. With an interactive UI in RPG Maker, I found myself crunching through deliverables at a faster rate. And although it still took time to get used to JavaScript syntax and the program’s interface, anything was better than being trapped in a warp of hopelessness. Using every available JavaScript For Dummies guide and earphones plugged firmly in my earlobes, we as a team burnt the midnight oil together. Jane as the brains behind the organization, responsible for every detail from the base idea to concept generation. She and Yili also worked hard on creating the sprites, hand-drawn character art, and scripts for character dialgoue. While the rest of us split the dev work amongst ourselves; Charlene and I focused on game physics and interaction, while Trevin worked mostly on game scripting and developing plugins not natively supported by RPGMaker. The prospect of sleep was tempting, but after seeing the rest of my team trudge on the entire night, my guilty conscience wouldn’t let me. By dawn, we began drifting in and out of consciousness and took shifts until daylight broke.
Guilty as charged
T-minus 00:00: Launch
If there’s anything I’ve learnt from this experience, it’s that being a good developer isn’t about knowing more than others. Rather, it’s about being willing to constantly learn and seek answers in the right places. I first experienced this from Trevin. Through working with him, he remained steadfast in the way he approached each feature; tackling them without regard for their complexities, using every available resource to seek answers even if he didn’t know where to begin, and constantly iterated upon improving his own code. But perhaps his biggest contribution was his willingness to adapt; using JavaScript instead of Lua for us who didn’t share the same technical proficiencies at the time. Even in the mere minutes before submissions, he remained cool and supported us as we finally pushed our complete work over the finish line.
By 2pm, the final project submission deadline was up, as the auditorium of 400+ participants waited in an eager clamor. Then, every group’s prototype and idea was judged. Here’s what we submitted.
Then came the madness
Amidst the celebration of 60+ groups, 5 groups were chosen as the competition’s finalists (6 in this case because we later found out that two groups scored the exact same points in the first stage). Having been pre-advised to prepare a presentation in case we made the finals, based of the judges facial reactions, we were ready to pack our bags and catch the next bus home. Then, against all expectations, and definitely beyond my wildest imagination, we were called to the front.
Oscillating between disbelief and panic, our team scrambled and eventually delivered a presentation worthy of the final judges, who were some pretty influential actors in Vancouver’s entreprenurial scene such as Hussein Hallak of Launch Academy and Dr Sarah Lubik from Simon Fraser’s University. After a long emotional overhaul, the judges had issued their verdict.
Truth being told, before any form of announcement was made, I promised myself two things: (a) win or lose, I’d still have much to learn; (b) if we did win, to prevent this victory from inflating unrealistic expectations of myself. In hindsight, the latter really shouldn’t have been there considering how much my contributions had paled next to my teammates’.
I remember
So nervously the moment when third prize was announced
So vividly the moment when the camera turned on us even before second prize was announced
So fondly the moment of excitement when my team and I scrambled onto stage in utter joy and disbelief.
Although words may not capture what I felt there and then, the emotion of the experience permanently lives within me.
At the end of the hole
If I were to rate this hackathon on a functional level, the experience itself did more for me than the prize ever did. Eduhacks served as a reminder that out there exists a supportive yet competitive Darwinian dimension to the field of technology; where you have to be better in order to thrive. I’m glad I got to meet its proponents, because now I have a reference point and have begun growing a network of contacts. It also introduced me the components of a good developer, philosophies than I hold closely into my own career. Overall, I’m really proud I attended this event and thankful for it catapulting me down this rabbit hole; a never-ending realm of questions and uncertainty. The reward of achievement was simply a surplus.
</b>Pictured from left to right:</b> me, Charlene, Jane, Trevin, Yili