Last weekend, I went to my first ever Hackathon.
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| 2015 Emirates Travel Hackathon in SF |
Before I went to the States to study, I've never ever thought about attending Hackathon.
Besides the fact that I do not major in Computer Science in undergrad, I had no interest in coding at all which drove me crazy and made me feel stupid lol.
However, when I came here last year, It took me a while to realize that coding is a really interesting and fascinating tool that can make your ideas come true, including App, Web or even machine learning which could predict human's behaviors.
Then, one of my best friend in USC, Yao-Jung, invited us to register for this event, Emirates Travel Hackathon.
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| Popcorn Chicken Schedule |
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| Travel Cost |
By the way, there are four team members, including me. (Stanley, Yao-Jung and Ian)
Our team called POPCORN CHICKEN. ya, that's right. don't be hesitated. We took 30 minutes to finalize our idea lol.
For the whole trip, it costed about $250 for each person.
We stayed up all night during Hackathon; therefore, we only booked three nights for accommodation.
It took us about 6 hrs from LA to our hotel (El Camino Inn) in Daly city for the first two nights.
We stopped by in the middle of our way to grab dinner that we arrived at hotel about midnight.
Emirates Hackathon took place in Runway incubator, located at Market St (The Twitter building)
Before Hackathon, we still have time to go to San Francisco downtown. Thanks to our "great" leader, Stanley, he planed one-day trip for us: Pier 39, Union Square, China Town and Twin peaks.
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| Pier 39 (1) |
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| Pier 39 (2) |
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| Union Square |
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| China Town, with Stanley's favorite Boba Tea |
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| Night view from Twin Peaks |
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| dreamlike colors |
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| The night before Hackathon, take a closer look for API information |
It only said that its theme is "Flight Search using Personas". In addition, there were almost 20 companies providing their API, including IBM, Splunk, Skyscanner, XOLA, StubHub, etc. Therefore, we tried to find out what API could we use and what kind of functions that we could implement to our mobile application that they had experiences building Android APP before.
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| The morning of the Hackathon |
Due to limited seating, Emirates only accepted the"First 300 Check-Ins" for participation at the hackathon that we needed to arrive at before registration time, which is 8am on 11/7. Therefore, we woke up at 6am, packaging our stuffs, and got there at 7:30. With unknown topics and first time in Hackathon, we were a little bit nervous but excited about what would happen in this great event.
Next article, I'm going to show you how did we come up with idea and what did we build. Isn't it exciting? Keep following my blog :)
I remember my first hackathon like it was yesterday. We were not quite as organized as you. We showed up late and were kind of lost the entire time. I loved every second though. I loved hearing the buzz of the place during the entire duration of the event. What a very special weekend that was and I won't forget.
ReplyDeleteLucius Cambell @ Skild