Lucky In London

The plan that I crafted since way back when to just join as many hackathon as possible while being here kind of flopped because GoldenHacks seems to not be happening, plus I got rejected by Hack the Valley and NewHacks (waitlisted first and then rejected). Hack Western 11 saved this plan from becoming an absolute dumpster fire.

(Barely) Getting In

I watched over the hackathon's registration before I even arrived in Canada. It wasn't yet open at that time but the website was already updated to a coming soon page for Hack Western 11, which said that the hackathon was going to happen on November. I put in my emails to the prompt in the page to keep myself informed once the registration opens. I registered as quickly as possible some time in October as soon as the registration was opened.

A while passed and it was then early November. I saw an email from them on the 11th informing me that they were unable to offer me an acceptance to the event. I quickly accepted that since at that point it was evident that getting into a hackathon here in Canada is just not easy, as I was already rejected by both Hack the Valley and NewHacks. I accepted the fact that my original plan of getting into as many hackathons as possible here (and possibly winning some of them) simply just didn't pan out.

During my time volunteering for Hack the North, I met Tyson Caul who was participating as a hacker in the hackathon. He's a second-year computer science student at University of Toronto and he's also interested in participating in as many hackathons as possible. After Hack the North, we had hung out at UofT and we had also been talking about Hack the Valley and NewHacks. After the revelation above, I immediately messaged him informing him that I got rejected. He then told me that he was accepted into the hackathon and wished me good luck for the next one.

Two weeks passed and it was then Monday the 25th. I was scouring through my emails looking for an email for a (very) personal project that I was working on, completely unrelated to this hackathon. And it was at that moment that I found out that I was actually accepted into the hackathon! There was an earlier email from Hack Western that came in on the 28th of October informing me that I was accepted into the hackathon. I think I completely missed that email because it came in on the reading week when I was locked in on that (very) personal project that I had been working on. I concluded that the rejection email on the 10th rejected me because I failed to fill in the RSVP form on time before the 1st of November, not long after I received the 28th of October email.

I immediately messaged Tyson about this and he told me that he was actually about to un-RSVP because his peaking academic workload wouldn't allow him to go. He then threw out an idea of giving up his RSVP slot to me, since I was originally accepted into the hackathon and only forgot to RSVP. I crafted an email for him to sent to the organizers with me CCed in it that aimed to do that. Fortunately, the organizers allowed Tyson's suggestion and told me to promptly fill in the RSVP form. I was absolutely ecstatic and giddy for the opportunity to finally save my original plan from being a complete flop.

Pessimistic Start

After the excitement of going into the hackathon wore off, a modest level of anxiety set in because it was the late stage of this semester where I had assigments that started to pile up, but now I had an additional non-trivial loads to prepare for the hackathons, such as finding a bus ticket to London, Ontario that I could pay for (since the next round of my allowance had not come yet and I only had little of the allowance that I had left), finding a teammate, and possibly crafting some ideas for the project that I was going to build (though I wasn't too worried with needing to have an idea prior to the event since the hackathon here is quite different from the one in Indonesia because here you're meant brainstorm the ideas for your project during the hackathon itself, not prior to it).

Getting the bus tickets wasn't hard, but it wasn't that cheap either because the round trip ticket costs 70 CAD. I had to skip out on two of my last classes on Friday since to arrive on the venue by 5 PM (when the registration for the hackathon attendees starts), I had to take quite a bit of a journey. I had to take the shuttle bus to the downtown campus, ride the TTC subway to the Union Station, walked from the subway station to the bus terminal at Union, and then ride the bus to London that I had bought the tickets for. I departed from the Mississauga campus at 10 and arrived at Western University at 16.30. After that I still had to walk 15-20 minutes or so to reach the building in which the event is held. I carried only my laptop (and its charger), some clothes, and a small bolster that I brought from Indonesia that could be used as a pillow. All of that were packed in my backpack and a shopping bag from Dollarama. When walking to the venue, I had to bear the cold temperature eating away at my bare hands since I had forgot to bring my gloves.

Getting the teammate wasn't easy though. up until my bus's departure I watched over the #find-a-team channel on their Slack to message anyone looking for a team as soon as possible. None of them stuck, presumably because they already got messages that were quicker than mine asking if they could join their team. It was the fact that I didn't have a teammate up until the hackathon's registration that made the time leading up to the hackathon filled with pessimism, because it would be an uphill battle to brainstorm and complete a hackathon project by myself. So I was there queuing for the registration when I decided to once again scour the #find-a-team channel. I messaged Nathan, a fellow participant who just posted on the channel looking for a teammate, asking him if I could join his team. Fortunately, he still had one more slot left on his team, and I immediately said yes to being admitted to his team. The other three members of the team was Nathan, Mahdi and Dhir. Nathan is a second-year computer science student at Western University. Dhir is a third-year computer science student at Western University (though he's virtually in his second-year since he transferred from engineering after his first year). Mahdi is a computer science student at the University of Waterloo student was doing a co-op in this fall semester at a company in London, Ontario.

After I registered myself, I went around talking to the sponsors in the event's sponsor bay along with this girl from UofT St. George called Alvina. She was a third-year computer science student at UofT. Right after that, I got to meet Dhir and Nathan, two of my teammates. Dhir showed me the EEG device that he was hoping to be used for the hack, a Muse headband that was released in 2016. Me and Nathan was quite excited for this as using EEG would definitely give us a significant upper hand because of the novelty and uniqueness that I could immediately lend to our project. Not long after that Mahdi, our other teammate arrived as well at the venue.

Heartbreaking Opening

After the registration has concluded, we were brought to the Ivey Business School building for the event's opening. There was first a talk from the handful of sponsors about career and internship opportunities from them, as well as about the awards category that they sponsored. The most notable sponsor is Starknet due to their prize. They had first place, second place, and third place for projects that best utilizes Starknet. They were notable because their prizes were 3000 dollars, 2000 dollars, and 1000 dollars. And it's in the full fat American dollars, not the weaker Canadian one.

Those were great, but the real highlight of the opening was from its keynote speaker, a founder of a community called AI circle. The speaker told the story of his life and its stages presented in the form of neural network layers: he dubbed his early childhood as the input layer, his adolescent as the first hidden layer, so on and so forth. He was dealt a bad hand from the start. He had an alcoholic father who would commit domestic violence and he lived in one of the poorest neighborhoods in California. It led to an adolescent that wasn't ideal where he would be eager to pick fights with other students. This then led to him almost being expelled from high school. It was only in the last fight that he participated in that he decided to fix the error his way when the local police officer expressed his disappointment on the speaker. The officer was disappointed that the person that the officer used to see protect his younger sister with his dear life was out there endangering his life and his future by his reckless behavior. It prompted a deep reflection on the speaker that asked "what if she saw me now?". Long story short, he managed to be a hardworking student for the remainder of high school and got into university majoring in education. But In the final year of his university, he had to cope with his best friend being murdered by local gang members. This was another one of his turning point because it refocused his aim in life into maximizing his impact unto the world rather than seeking the most benefit for his own self-interest.

This was only half of the story. He went on to talk about his struggle as a teacher with integrity (I outlined this specifically because at one point he was fired from his job because he was unwilling to forge documents that would've given the school he was working on more funding) and subsequently a principal. He became a principal of one of the worst performing school in the county, but year by year he slowly improved his school until it became the best in the county. After that, he moved to New York (he was originally from California) to replicate his work of turning around low-performing schools. During his time in New York, he was surprised at the amount of violence that he had to encounter in his day-to-day commute from his home to the school he worked at. From this, he was able to understand exactly the sort of things that his students had to put up with, unlike his colleagues that decided to not use public transport.

He then moved into telling the final part of his story of going back to university. He wanted to do an MBA at Harvard but the cost was too prohibitively expensive for him. So he decided to pick another major (that I completely forgot) but still enroll at the business classes at Harvard. After he graduated, he then got his start at the start-up world.

He took an hour or so to tell the story above, so there's likely quite a handful of details that I recalled inaccurately or outright forgot. I might have done a poor job doing a retelling of his story but believe me that the original story as told by him in that auditorium was so captivating and inspiring. It was definitely a tearjerker (and I don't mean to say that as a bad thing at all) that made me able to remind myself of the fortunate circumstances and privilege that I had received, as well as the exceptionally favorable material conditions that I was enjoying then. I had been dealing with some personal issues from my arrival in Canada up until now, so it's always nice to be able to take a step back and be able to know that all things considered I'm doing well and that I should be able to do better given the many blessings that God had given me.

Initial Work

After the opening ceremony was finished, we went to a building that Nathan said had nice comfortable classes that could used for working on the hackathon. So we walked 5-10 minutes to another building and just set ourselves up in an empty lecture room. There we bounced ideas off of each other on what project we could possibly do and (most importantly) how could we incorporate EEG into it. It was so nice doing it in a classroom meant for 50 people or so where we could use the multiple chalkboards in the classroom for idea generations.

One of the first idea that we had was of a game controlled by the brain function recorded by the EEG. We first thought of a game of PONG controlled by the focus level of the brain, but then we thought that it would be too simple and actually pretty hard to control using focus because focus isn't like a switch you can turn on and off.

After that we thought of two other games. Nathan had the idea of a simple memory recall game, while I proposed tower stacking game. I used to play tower stacking game almost religiously back in elementary school and I thought that it would be the perfect sort of game to use EEG since the controls are relatively simple, you just need to control the next tower block position along the horizontal axis, and then click a button once you'd like to drop it.

So what we ended up deciding to make is a "suite" of games controlled by EEG. The idea here was that the game would cater towards people who suffer from limited mobility, such as quadriplegia, who won't be able to use conventional game controls that rely on one's hand. Additionally, since some of the games that we were making are controlled by the focus level of the brain, we thought it could also assists people with ADHD in training their concentration.

We spent the rest of our time until late at night at 1 just setting things up and determining the goals for the next day. We chose to make the game a web application built in React to make it easy for our development. I setup a simple wrapper function and React hook to dispatch the "high-level" events from the EEG such as blink, focus, head tilt, etc.. The dispatcher will then be called by the component that listens to the data from the EEG. But, since that component will likely still be developed by Mahdi and Dhir up until later on the next day, I also setup a mock emitter that uses the keyboard input to dispatch certain EEG events. That way the development of the game could run smoothly in parallel with the development of the EEG input parser component.

Dhir, Nathan, and Mahdi got back to their living space while I stayed at the venue to sleep on the air mattresses provided by the organizer. Despite that, I still had a good 6 hours sleep, probably because I am just a heavy sleeper who tend to sleep soundly once I fall asleep.

The next day once my team has gathered again, we quickly moved into another unused classroom at the Lawson Hall (the campus building next to the venue). It was such a nice place to do our work because one side of the classroom is just a panel of window overlooking the outside that was snowing. It truly was a cool (pun intended) experience to code and stuff while looking out at the snow covered ground and the bits of snows slowly descending into the ground.

I spent the morning and the afternoon taking an embarrassingly long time to implement a modified version of the tower stacking game. That was all for nothing though since midway through we deemed that the modified version is worse than the original one and is unnecessary since we changed the controls. Originally we wanted the player to have to move the tower themselves using their focus, but we then decided that it's more ergonomic (and arguably more challenging) to have the block move automatically back and forth. The player then only needs to blink at the right time to drop the new block of tower as accurately as possible into the building below it. The cool thing here is that the blink will be detected by the EEG device, not by the player's webcam.

By the afternoon Nathan had already finalized the memory game. It uses head nod of the player to determine which of the symbols are being selected by the player when they recall the sequence that the game had shown them. He thought that having three games is the minimum for the project to be seen as robust, so he thought of another game that actually utilizes all of the EEG controls that we had. It's kind of an esoteric game, but essentially you need to tilt your head into the right spot that is shown on screen, and then once you positioned your head, you need to keep up your focus for 3 seconds to get a score. After the three seconds has elapsed, a new position for the player to tilt their head to will be given and they'll get to do that again. It doesn't sound that fun when I describe it here, but I think the main game loop is actually kind of addicting once you try to play it. We later called this game GyroFocus since you need to both tilt your head and focus (very creative naming I know).

Second Night

For the rest of the hackathon, we stayed in the classroom of Lawson Hall that we had set ourselves in. This ended up becoming a bit of a problem since neither Dhir and Nathan (who are students at Western University) is part of the department that resides in the Lawson Hall, and thus their keycard have no overnight access to the building (buildings at Western University can be entered freely during the day, but at night the entry doors are automatically locked and thus only members of the department can enter). So, if we wanted to get outside of the building, such as when we want to have dinner at the event's venue right next to the Lawson Hall, one person would need to stay behind to open the door once the others came back. At one point, I tried to prop open the door into the building when I went out, but when I came back the prop was removed and the door was locked. We presumed that campus security would be notified when building entry doors are propped open for more than several minutes, after which they would come down and remove the prop to keep the building secure. It wasn't convenient at all because our classroom was on the third floor and on the other side of the building relative to the entry door. But I guess that's the price we had to pay for not actually having any authorization for being in that building.

Anyways, we were locked in for the night finalizing and working on the app. It's once said that during game development, the end product wouldn't make sense before it finally "clicked" at one point near the end of the development. I believe that was the mantra that BioWare had during their development (evidently they didn't find anything remotely similar to a click for their recent games but I digress). The night was that moment. By just a short time before midnight, the tower stacking and memory game was functionally done (though they still required some polish and decoration), while the GyroFocus game was almost functionally done as well as it only needed some tweaks to the mechanics.

There was a funny debugging moment when we tried to debug why the game couldn't register the focus. The four of us congregated around Dhir's laptop with me trying to figure out what went wrong in the abstraction that Dhir made to read the EEG focus data. I followed the trail and found out that Dhir had made a silly mistake of passing a function but treating it as a variable instead of a function. We all laughed together at the hilarity of that.

Later that night and after midnight my job was to polish up the crude UI that we had for the game menu and the game itself. I was perfectly set for this as I had been working on a (very) personal project that required quite the eye for a good and polished UI/UX. I utilized the theming functionality of daisyui (which is also used in the aforementioned (very) personal project) to quickly pick a coherent theme and implement it throughout the application. Working on the (very) personal project also made me used to adding sounds to a web application (it's really easy, just use the use-sound hook here), which I also implemented for the memory game and the tower block stacking game.

The hallway outside of the classroom (and I suppose of the whole building) was quite spooky. The hallway felt ominous with the red exit sign at each of its end and the turning off of half of the light bulb. There was a "start of a horror movie" type of vibe, especially once you enter the bathroom (which I had to do a handful of times during the night) that is located on the other side of the hallway relative to the classroom. Every time I walked to the bathroom I was acting paranoid by looking over my shoulder and behind me occasionally throughout the walk there.

At 4AM, me and Dhir decided to walk 15 minutes or so to a 7-eleven to get some snacks and possibly breakfast. It was nice walking through the campus and seeing the Western University's many buildings with the ambiance of jet black sky and light white snow. I was about to grab a beef jerky before I immediately put it back into the rack once I saw that pork was on the ingredient list. They had quite a few sandwich in their refrigerated rack but I wasn't feeling like eating bread that night. So I ended up only grabbing a long bar of KitKat while Dhir bought a handful of Monster cans.

Once I got back, I decided to work on polishing the UI of the GyroFocus game. Mahdi made some improvements to the UI of the memory game and fine tuned the EEG device. Dhir was exploring the possibility of integrating Starknet into the game somehow to get it admitted into the bounties for Starknet. Nathan had gone back to his house at 2AM to get some sleep, while the three of us chose to stay to sleep in the room.

I finally decided to sleep at 5AM expecting to wake up at 7AM because the submission deadline was 9AM. I just slept at the floor of the classroom (which was thankfully carpeted) with my puffer and inner jacket as a pillow (my smaller bolster was in the venue building which was already locked at that time).

Submission

I woke up at 7.45 but only became fully operational around 8. I felt so frigid after I woke up for some reason (maybe because I decided to sleep on the floor). We only had an hour until the submission deadline but there were quite a few things that we had not yet prepared for. The project description that we prepared the night before had to be changed to become less fluffy and less robotic. We have not yet recorded a demo video (which wasn't mandatory, but it's still very important to have if you want to win anything), and I had not yet setup my DoraHacks (the platform that is used to submit our project) account to be part of the Hack Western hackathon event on the platform.

My neglect of forgetting to join the event in the DoraHacks platform led to a technical issue during submission that prompted me to race as quickly as possible to the venue building next door. The issue was that during submission, they couldn't add me as part of the team, presumably because I had only joined the hackathon on the DoraHacks platform before we started to fill the submission form. Once I got into the table for submission issue that had been setup by the organizer, I called my teammates back in the Lawson Hall to coordinate with them. We ended up needing to submit the project first, and then edit the submission to add me as a teammate. The submission was accepted just fine by the kind organizers fortunately even though it was already 9.30 when our submission issue was resolved. We submitted our hack applying for the following bounties: first place, second place, third place, best hardware hack, and best video game hack.

Demo and Judging

The demo started at 10 in the beautiful hall where they also held their dinner the night before. We were assigned half a table to setup our laptops and do a demo of our project to any passerby (including the judges) who are interested. The judge for the main track (first, second, and third place) was the organizers themselves. We were given 3 minutes to showcase our project and 2 minutes for QnA with the judge. From the get go we set Mahdi up as the person playing the game since the app was calibrated to his motions and brain activity levels. The demo was then Mahdi focused on playing the game while the rest of us explain what it is that he's doing, what's the game about, etc..

The bounties that we were looking for was the best video game hack. That hack was sponsored by the Big Blue Bubble video game studio, it's a game studio based in London, Ontario that have been sponsoring Hack Western annually. Their senior developer was sent to the hackathon to host their sponsor booth at the hackathon's sponsor bay and will also be the judge for the best video game hack bounty. So we showed off the game to him and he seemed very intrigued by it (he even turned off the judging timer when it rang to let us continue our explanation). And that made us really excited because it was the bounty that we actually had a good shot of winning. From DoraHacks we saw that there were only 9 hacks, including us, that applied for that bounty. From the other hacks, I liberally estimated that only four of them could be a threat to our chances.

During the judging period, we also got to talk to other teams and see their projects. We saw another person, his name was Gurkirat, defected from his team to make some type of a crowdfunding platform using the Starknet network. His team didn't want to back his idea because they were intimidated by the seemingly high amount of fellow hackers who wanted to win that Starknet hack bounty. He ended up going in alone on his idea. Which is an insane gamble but one that in hindsight was likely to pay off because despite the seemingly high number of hacker who's interested, at the end there were only 6 teams who applied for that bounty. Moreover, the sponsor of that bounty, Starknet, decided to throw in one more spot for their bounty for fourth place with the reward of 500 dollars (again, it's American and not Canadian). This meant that he had a 67% chance of winning fat stacks through his gamble.

The experience of looking at the hacks here echoed my sentiment when I saw the hacks at Hack the North. In my humble opinion, the projects at the hackathons here seems to have more variety and feels more out-of-the-box compared to the hackathons that I participated in back in Indonesia. One specific example is how more likely it is that they would use actual hardware such as Arduino because the hackathon (at least Hack Western and Hack the North) made the effort to accommodate that by providing hardware bay where hackers could check out hardware to be used for their hacks. Another example is well my own team. How likely is it that a teammate bring in an EEG headset that they just happen to own to be used in their hack? Evidently here it's likely enough as shown by how I did get such a teammate completely at random during Hack Western.

Awards

The awarding took place two hours after the judging in the auditorium of another building. The five finalists for the first, second, and third place of the hackathon was called to the front to present their project in front of the finalist judges. They were definitely informed prior to that that they were the finalist since the setup and whatnot for their project was already prepared (unlike hackjakarta where you present right after your name was called). So we already knew that we won't be a finalist for the main track prizes. It was still cool though seeing the projects of the five finalists. The most interesting project out of the five in my opinion was a unified software for emergency call operators to manage emergency calls. It could receive emergency calls, summarize the content of the calls, and dispatch help all from one place. The software seemed to be so polished and robust in the demo. The other finalist was a marketplace for used market goods where they utilize a library that was developed by Nvidia to process the photos taken by the seller into a 3D model that can be seen by potential buyers. They hope that this feature would protect them from scam, thus inspiring confidence in the buyer that would then increase their likelihood to buy used goods in the market place.

After the finalists was done presenting their projects, the judges got out of the room for their deliberation. In the meantime, the winners for the other bounties (of which there were many) were announced one by one. We knew that we probably didn't win best hardware because although hardware was part of our hack, we used an off-the-shelf hardware and a library developed by the manufacturer to interop with the hardware, we weren't doing any clever things on the hardware level by ourselves. The moment of truth came when they were about to announce the winner of the best video game hack. The four of us were so ecstatic when we saw the name of our project (despite of the typo) being shown on screen as the winner. We walked to the front of the stage to take a photo with the four Nintendo Switch Lite that each of us won, alongside the senior game developer at Big Blue Bubble, Matt Sterner, who had been our judge for the bounty.

Afterwards, the four of us took a photo together again with our prizes in front of the stage. We also talked with Matt Sterner about what to do after this. Apparently the four of us would be given a tour of their office and an opportunity to chat with our hiring managers. It was set to happen sometime after new year, so I couldn't attend and informed him of that. He then told me that in that case the chat with the hiring manager for me would be conducted virtually. He also said that this has happened previously a year prior when one member of the team that won this bounty couldn't physically attend the tour.

Now to me that was hilarious because the exact same thing happened when I was about to depart to Canada. In GarudaHacks 5.0 back in July (see full story here), all the winners were entitled to an office tour of tiket.com. It was set to happen just a week before my departure on the 23rd of August. But it was postponed because of a certain political meltdown in the capital to the middle of September, which made it so that I couldn't attend the event. Maybe there's a conspiracy by the universe to ensure that I will work in Covena right after my arrival back to Indonesia.

The Long Way Home

I purposefully chose the departure time of 8PM, quite a while after the event was scheduled to conclude because I wanted to hang out for a bit with the IISMA awardees from Western University. Funnily enough, around half of them went to Toronto that weekend, so I only got to meet their co-SR, Dio. We talked for a while about our experiences thus far in the University Community Centre building of Western University (it was basically a student centre building). He then gave me a tour of the library there, took me back to their dorm to take a look inside, and then to a shawarma place not close from there that was just outside of campus. Unfortunately I didn't get to come back to the dorm with him when he ordered pizza as I had to run because it was approaching 8PM. I ran back to the dorm to grab my stuff that I left there when I first got in, and then walked as quickly as possible to where the bus stopped to pick up its passengers.

The bus that took me from Toronto to London took just over 3 hours so I expected the trip back to also take that long. But for some reason it only took just over 2 hours? I figured it's probably because there's not as much traffic going back or something. In any case, I arrived at 10.30PM at the Union Station. The subway station at Union was closed, so I had to walk about 10 minutes to the next station over, King, to get on the subway to Kipling, which is the final station for the subway line that also houses the bus terminal for Mississauga's bus service provider company, MiWay. From there I could take a bus to the UofT Mississauga (UTM) campus. King was on the Yonge-University (yellow) line while Kipling is on the Bloor-Danforth (green) line. My first instinct was to get to the St. George station to change lines, since that's the station I most often use because it's located right next to the UofT St. George campus in downtown Toronto. However, I actually got on the train on the wrong side of the station at King, so I ended up going the other way. Fortunately, because of the way the subway line is setup, I still could change line to the green line, with the only downside of needing to go through 2 or so more stations once I'm in the green line before I get to Kipling. I arrived at Kipling at just short of 12AM. There shoudl've been a 1C W bus line that would have taken me straight from Kipling to UTM, but I think they ceased operation on Sunday (which stupidly happened a lot in Mississauga despite the fact that bus usage would likely increase on the weekend), so I had to take the 26 W bus instead. The bus took me just short of UTM, so when I arrived an hour later at just short of 1AM, I had to walk fifteen minutes from the bus stop to UTM. It was definitely an experience needing to carry all that I had brought to the hackathon in the dead of night through the road leading up to the university. I like the fact that I have the grit to do all of the above just for a chance to excel and win at something.

Conclusion

To Meet People or To Win?

I would have loved to spend more time talking to the sponsors in the sponsor bay, attending their workshops, or just networking in general. But your ability to do that is kind of hindered by the fact that you will be taking the time for doing those out of the time that you could have used to develop the hackathon project. Thus, you can't really fully aim to win a hackathon if you still want to seek all of the above. Either you lock yourself in for the whole duration of the hackathon completing your project to make it have the most chance of winning, or you take a more laid back approach and spend a substantial amount of time building networks and attending other stuffs that the hackathon has to offer.

Niche Positioning

There were bounties offered by Major League Hacking (MLH) for best utilization of several specific tech stacks, such as Auth0, Streamlit, and Cloudflare C3. There were two of these bounties that had zero submissions: midnight and Adobe Express. midnight required you to make a decentralized application using the midnight library. Adobe Express wanted you to make an add-ons for the application utilizing the APIs provided by Adobe for add-ons developer. If we had developed any one of those, we would have been guaranteed a win. Now whether or not you'd prefer to make something to win or make something that you would want to make is a separate discussion. Point being, shooting for bounties that other people are unlikely to pick is a legit strategy, even in a hackathon this big (according to the hackathon page on DoraHacks, there are 62 submissions and 189 hackers). And indeed, my team unknowingly did this strategy by making a video game (we only realized that the hackathon had a best video game hack bounty on the second night of the hackathon) where it turned out that we only had to compete with 8 other submissions.

This strategy is so reminiscent of positioning, one of the key component of strategy that was the central topic of discussion for IMI303.

Why I Won

I'm not going to falsely claim that I won the best video game hack bounties solely or even mostly because of my skills. It definitely still mattered, as I believe the aesthetically pleasing design that I implemented for the game pushed it to the final 20% required to truly elevate the out-of-the-box concept from being an uncut diamond to a polished diamond one would put on a wedding ring. But evidently from what I have written, there is another significant factor at play here: luck. And that I think is the biggest takeaway from hackathons. Striving to win is obviously great and necessary, but don't beat yourself up if you don't get to win, because there are so much factors outside of your control that determine whether or not you'll win. This story illustrates some of those factors, such as the team that you get, the quality of other hacker's submissions, the amount of hacker making the same thing that you were making, etc.. It solidifies the key takeaways that I have got so far from my fairly limited experience in hackathon.

TL;DR just make cool shit.