Hosted in Detroit, MI by the University of Michigan, and known as the world's largest hackathon, it is best described as an insane two-day-long, sleep-optional festival of caffeine & code. Twelve-hundred students from all over the country travel to MHacks in groups or individually to meet other hackers, get a chance to build-out and demo an idea, and in the process maybe win fabulous prizes (or a job).
Contrary to popular belief, hackathons rarely involve hacking "into" things (unless that's what you're into). Instead, they are an opportunity for you to take an idea for an app/service/product/cool-thingy and make it a reality. There's developers who know PHP, Node.js, MongoDB, Google App Engine, just about any web framework imaginable, and then some. Others specialize in iOS or Android apps. Still others build hardware hacks using Oculus Rift, Arduinos, Raspberri Pi's, Kinects, and more. And of course, what good is an app if it isn't pleasant to use? Designers for all of these systems were ready and willing to lend their expertise, too. Needless to say, there's an incredibly wide range of hacks that come out of these competitions. I saw everything from a rapping robot, to a medical prescription review-compiling app, to a twerk-counting app. Literally anything you can imagine.
So what was it like? In short, insane. MHacks officially began at 7:30PM on Friday the 17th; at 9:00PM you could officially begin working on your project, and by 9AM Sunday you had to submit your code. Simple enough, but what happens in between is nothing short of incredible. When you're working against a countdown timer to come up with an idea, plan out how you will execute it, build the idea, and get it ready for testing, sleep becomes a very optional thing. Knowing this, MHacks equipped us with mountains of RedBull (that seemed to disappear almost instantly every time they brought more out), snacks, and water. Coders brought their laptops, tablets, keyboards, mice, monitors, all-in-one computers and just about every gadget known to man (and some known to monkey).
We thought we were ready. We were wrong.
As a general rule, no matter how much of a night owl you are, no one is an expert in anything at 4AM, especially having been awake the previous 48 hours. And when working on such a limited time schedule, everyone starts out knowing what begins as a to-do list app might end up evolving into a social networking app. There's no point in stopping to question it because it has to get done and you don't have time to deal with it. In the words of one of the stickers we got while at MHacks, "F*** it, ship it". Anything goes. Just get it done.
When we finally decided on an idea, it was to build a textbook buying/selling app for students to use. The problem we were solving was straightforward: no one likes having to buy textbooks every semester. They're expensive, they're slow to ship, and you're gonna have a bad time. Similarly, no one likes selling to textbook buyback centers because they will completely rip you off and then charge the next guy double. Additionally, other solutions students have found involve using Facebook to sell their textbooks, meaning there's no centralized database to be able to find a book you want and buy it at a reasonable price. So we built an app that allowed students to buy and sell to each other directly, regardless of school, location, or class. It's best described as a Craigslist for textbooks, and we called it TextbookLoop.
My team and I had rather disparate talents, so everyone had to step a little outside their comfort zone in order to get things done. Again, no time to stop and question whether it can be done, only time to build. And build we did. Three of us operated as back-end developers, working on building the classes and databases necessary to store any information; I took on the role of front-end designer, working on the look-and-feel of the website and making sure that once the back-end was plugged in, things would look polished. It's not something I've had too much experience with in the past (though I did design most of Dining with Strangers entirely from scratch), but it is something I've been trying to dabble more and more in. I love making a website fun to use and pleasing to look at, and it's a skill set I hope to develop more as time goes on.
Day One
We started coding almost immediately, with everyone working on what they could contribute to the project. Some people were better at some things than others, and we all had to read how-to guides and install software to make sure we could all work on the project. Getting version control set up was painless, though using it was as miserable an experience as always (though it did save our behinds more often than not). Once we got into the zone, we were extremely productive for a solid 24 hours. And then our energy levels went downhill. With 12 hours to go, we realized we weren't very close to finished. So we began to triage, and made some pretty good choices as to what should take priority. Around 4AM the day of submission, most of our team crashed. However, the coding gods smiled down on us and we managed to get the bulk of our product working; just enough to deliver a convincing demo. By 9AM, we made our submission, and we were done.
No, wait, no we weren't. We still had to demo! So there we were, tired as people who just got off 36-hour shifts (because we had), presenting the fruit of our labor to hundreds of people at a science-fair-like setup. This was perhaps my favorite part; I've always fancied myself a bit of a showman, and so I really enjoyed being able to wow people with the software we built (and I, smiling to myself, because it couldn't do absolutely everything we were demoing but they didn't have to know that, right?). So I threw on some music, made a sign with our logo on it, and in every way tried to stand out from the crowd as much as possible. Keep in mind I still haven't slept for more than an hour since flying out to Detroit at 6AM Friday. I'm exhausted, and I want to be home, but I'm giving it my all. My pitch started out something like this:
Are you a student? Yes! Then you know how much of a pain it is to have to buy and sell textbooks every semester. It's expensive, it's slow, and no one likes to do it. What if I said you could cut out the expensive book stores, even the online ones, and get the cheapest possible price from someone near you selling the textbook? No shipping fees, no waiting, just a cheap textbook. And all you have to do to find the right book is enter the name of the class you're taking. Here's TextbookLoop...
Needless to say, it was something of a hit with everyone who saw our demo. And though it isn't completely finished, my team and I do plan to keep working on it in the hopes of some day releasing it. Unfortunately, hackathon teams and projects tend to be by their very nature ephemeral, and most disappear off the face of the earth soon after the hackathon is over. So we'll see how it goes!
The top prizes were handed out that afternoon, and though we didn't receive an award, it was incredible seeing what some people built in 36 hours. Some of the winners included a task-automating app for iOS, a search-by-phrase Chrome extension that could be used on YouTube videos, and a Kinect body-tracking Nerf gun-shooting thing. My favorite took the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, attached a Wii controller to a broom-stick, and recreated an immersive Harry Potter Quidditch experience. It provided some amazing visuals and made me excited for some of the things virtual reality allows.
All in all, the hackathon was an incredible experience. We were surrounded by representatives from the likes of Apple, Evernote, Bloomberg, Yelp, and more. We had caffeine fueling our coding craze, and and we made some really good friends in the process of building our apps. We gained a huge appreciation of Twilio for bringing us chili-dogs at 1AM day-of-demo, when we were beginning to starve, and renewed our appreciation for sleep. It was a lot of fun, though I don't think I'll be staying up late for quite a while. Oh, wait, time for homework...