Ecoplus II: Hackathon

Pre-hackathon

In the two weeks leading up to the hackathon, we worked on the inception deck and some pages. I created the database and an example serverless function. I documented how to do it so my teammates can refer to it and do the same. I was glad to see that they picked it up easily.

Hackathon

The hackathon takes place from 17-19 November.

• 17 November
  0900 - 1800: Face-to-face
• 18 November
  0900 - 1400: Virtual
  1400 - 1800: Face-to-face
• 19 November
  1000 - 1230: Virtual presentation

I was excited as it would be my virgin hackathon experience and I would get to interact with my teammates physically.

Day 1

Our first day of the hackathon began with a briefing from Overflow and a short meeting to discuss our goals for the day. I spent most of the day adding insert values to the database, adding triggers and testing them.

Throughout the day, it was fun interacting with my team members and I also suggested going to the Nerf station to take a break and have some fun. Nerf was a great stress reliever indeed. We were given complimentary Fererro Rocher, and also managed to beat the high score by shooting down 7 cans. Too bad our marksman, Kah Seng, was missing though.

I had a virtual interview with GovTech for an internship opportunity at 3pm, which made me nervous in the hour leading up to it. My teammates encouraged me which gave me more confidence. I did the interview outside our classroom in a corner.

The interview went well. When I came back, I continued working on the database. We were given KitKats and a goodie bag when we left, along with a water bottle. I was really tired when I got home and took a 3-hour nap.

Day 2

On our second day of the hackathon, I went to school early together with some other students. The Overflow members were nice and gave us some KitKats.

I continued working on the database setup and changed some column names to make it clearer. I forgot to document the changes, and we ran into problems with the serverless functions as those column names were not updated. This was my fault, and I learnt that it is important to share about breaking changes. I also had some typos and errors, such as forgetting to add a PK constraint to a M:N intermediate table which Kah Seng pointed out and I fixed promptly.

After the database setup was done, I tried to add image uploads so that users on the website can add profile pictures, community pictures and event pictures. I ran into many problems as this was new to me. I made some progress, but sadly I was unable to complete it by the end of the day, so I will have to continue working on this feature in the future.

We also went for another round of Nerf but this time we got less points. Towards the end of the day, it was announced that we tied for first place with another team. We got a huuuge bag of snacks as a prize, which I appreciate.

Again, I went home tired and slept until 930 pm. We had a rehearsal for our presentation at 10pm.

Day 3

During the presentation today, I shared with the teacher about how we implemented Supabase into Ecoplus. I also showcased the Netlify functions that we used to host the website in.

Conclusion

Overall, I feel that the hackathon made me more productive and helped me bond with my teammates as well. We helped each other out and had fun, especially at the Nerf station. It was a good experience and made me more interested in hackathons.