A lot can happen in 4 months. It really is a long time, but I don’t think I can say that I’ve ever accomplished something as gratifying, or as difficult, as building the foundation to be a programmer. I was still attending classes in New York City in May but found myself in San Francisco by June. I had enrolled in a coding bootcamp, and instead of sweating every day in a suit riding the subway, I was throwing on a hoodie riding the trolley to school in a city on the opposite side of the United States.

The cliche thing to say would be that these 4 months have changed my life. But the truth is that these 4 months have also been one of the most tumultuous periods of my own, admittedly comfortable, life. Never had I been tested to question my commitments in life than at a school dedicated to developing serious full-stack software engineers. Never had I been so uncomfortable with the direction I thought my life was trending towards after comparing myself to what I thought I’d have accomplished by the age of 22. Never had I been so misplaced in an environment I clearly had no reason getting involved in.

I can’t say that I’ve overcome all these fears because I haven’t, but I also haven’t chosen to start writing in order to air out my vulnerabilities. My story is grounded in illustrating as many perspectives as I can share, and fresh off the excitement of winning a hackathon held by my own alma mater, this series of articles will be about my experiences in the realest way I can tell them.

So, on September 29th from 11 AM to September 30th at 4 PM, I attended HackNY’s Fall 2018 Hackathon hosted by the NYU Courant Institute. This was made especially memorable by the group of friends I first became hackers with over the summer in SF. We reunited over this event after having left SF over a month ago. None of us were very prepared, and honestly, we were getting ourselves into something way above our league, having only the experiences of building projects from the summer.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with hackathons or has never attended one, it is a communal gathering — not really a competition — of passionate engineers, designers, and idea people to come together and let their minds run wild. Sometimes there are themes, other times there might be goals or tasks, but the general motivation is to build something as cool as possible in 24 hours. HackNY pools together students from all around the tri-state area and beyond, with a hackathon that takes place in both the fall and spring of each year. It is one of the key stops in the MLH (Major League Hacking) tour each season. This event, for fall 2018, gave attendees free reign to build whatever they want within 24 hours, and demo it in front of judges from diverse industry backgrounds.

My team and I walked in with two initial ideas, with the goal of hopefully winning an award for “Best Use of a Local NYC API”. The first idea was an image recognition platform using the Clarifai API to identify trash, recyclables, and compost. The second idea involved The New York Times API, where we thought we could redesign the interface of the famous news source to make it millennial-friendly. Basically, we’d take the information you could source from the API and build an elegant, sound-byte style UI around it; you know, so that our goldfish-like attention span of a generation would actually want to check NYT for news one day. None of those ideas came to fruition, partly because we found out the day of that there were much more appealing awards, like Google Home Minis and waffle irons that made death-star shaped waffles. We also immediately assumed that the students wearing the Princeton or Cornell hoodies were going to build something on the caliber of an AI-based platform that detected cancer from selfies, and so we thought we really needed to step up our idea.

We brainstormed for about an hour and started trying to whip up as many APIs together so that we could have a shot at winning the most amount of awards. That’s what everyone does at hackathons right? Our idea, however, quickly settled on Kiwi (name and all), a web application that allowed someone to utter a discreet keyword into their Google Home, immediately alerting close friends/family via text that they are in some kind of danger. Alongside the Google Home action would be a web interface that allowed users to create an account and store their emergency contacts. This was really interesting for us, because it was our first time working with hardware and the Google Cloud Platform.

Kiwi also had a great amount of significance to us because of the political climate of our country, with Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and the impact of the #MeToo movement. We’ve seen how politics moves the needle on issues as important as sexual misconduct, but other times we’ve seen how it can create a standstill. Technology democratizes the ability of any person, no matter the partisan affiliation, to find a solution. It’s not that we set out to be civil rights advocates, but Kiwi’s motives gave us a sense of purpose behind what we were building, knowing that it would make society a safer place.

I personally enjoy the grueling 24 hours of building something from scratch. It becomes a continuous cycle of learning, coding, fixing bugs, reloading on caffeine, and repeat. For the first 12 hours, we built each of the components of Kiwi, such as the frontend interface, the backend server calls, the Twilio API, and the Google voice recognition platform. Pieces would come together whenever we felt like we needed a win to keep us motivated and for the most part, they did smoothly, so we’d celebrate with a caffeine or food break. The following 12 hours were not as easy. The need for sleep caught up, and one bug became multiple bugs after losing the ability to debug even the simplest mistakes. I spent four hours between the hours of 3:30AM and 7:30AM trying to host Kiwi on Google Firebase, thinking that it was critical in order to integrate the actual functions of Firebase, like writing and saving data, from our web interface. Another mistake I made that caught up with us right before we needed to submit our project was a poorly written for-loop in our registration page that caused every new user to save their credentials into Firebase as many times as having iterated over all the existing user credentials we had stored (got that?). I essentially crashed our database due to the amount of data that kept being exponentially multiplied each time we registered a new user, 20 minutes before our demo. Oh, and don’t let me forget — we managed to break our entire code with a layer of CSS styling that corrupted and had to refresh our progress with the Github repo in order to even have a working product to submit on time. It was pure chaos in the last hour before submission, and I loved every second of it.

We demoed (thankfully without hard-coding anything), and somehow won 1st Place Overall. I was so sleep-deprived that the experience has become somewhat blurry. Nevertheless, I’m proud of the validation we received with HackNY and proud of the significance of our project, Kiwi. Could I have imagined that I’d be writing about this experience four months after graduating from business school? Absolutely not.

My overall lesson from all of this: take a leap of faith once in a while. Break down everything that you think you’re good at, and challenge that presumption. Remove yourself from comfortable environments and drop yourself in ones that are not. There are so many opportunities out there, ways to provide value to the world around you. I didn’t want to learn to code because I had a bad experience with a Python class I took in college. My excuse for not learning ended up becoming “I’ll just find someone with the technical skills to do it” or “My strength will be to handle the business side” (btw amazing group to join if you want a good laugh: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1401833413216649/). In the end, I knew that I had to learn in order to work on my own projects. But I think the challenge of learning to code, the feeling of not understanding things that even the earliest CS majors understood, made me want to learn it even more. The struggle of feeling inadequate and incapable in those situations, when you personally feel helpless, make something like winning a hackathon all the more rewarding.

At times, I still feel misplaced amongst a community of talented CS majors and other coders. But without this new world that I’ve launched myself into, I’d feel like a piece of the puzzle was missing. I’m genuinely excited to keep building and keep exploring. Thanks to the HackNY community for organizing this incredible event, and thanks to Sisi, Francis, and Antonio for taking this journey with me.