DND Hackathon

Why I joined

After doing a few hackathons, hackathon announcements kept popping up in my feed.

I reached out again to a teammate I worked well with at the last hackathon.

As expected, they immediately said yes…

So we applied, got lucky, and both got accepted.

Team building

There were people who applied as teams and people who applied individually.

Step one was getting invited to Discord and posting a self intro in the PR channel.

You could join a team that was recruiting, or write your own recruitment post.

My colleague and I wrote a recruitment post.

Luckily, talented designers and backend engineers joined us.

We quickly scheduled time to decide the team name and do ideation.

Two of the three hackathon themes were daily life and local. We did not know the remaining keyword yet.

My idea was a service that shows events for each region, from festivals to small things like a dog’s birthday.

Other members suggested great ideas too, but we voted and my idea was chosen.

After deciding, we did not really go into detailed planning yet.

Hackathon

The hackathon took place at the Programmers training center near Namsoul Terminal.

It was awkward at first since we had just met, but we loosened up quickly.

The final keyword revealed was inconvenience. It fit my idea, so we kept it as is.

The designers had already collected references before the hackathon, so they cranked out UI really fast.

I chose Kakao Map because it was the most familiar.

I looked for a quick SDK and found this package.

It was not official, but the abstraction was great and it served us well throughout the hackathon.

After the “highlight of hackathons,” late night snacks, we ran into an issue during implementation.

We needed to save and manage events in user accounts. We could have done a simple ID and password,

but for some reason we decided to do OAuth. We struggled for hours and everyone was exhausted.

Maybe because it was late, even things that seemed easy did not work. Big respect to my teammate who carried us with next-auth.

In hackathons, frontend always ends up sprinting at the end. We kept running until the presentation.

Presentation and demo

As team lead, I handled the presentation. But I was coding frontend until the last minute, so I could not fully review the deck our designer made.

We had the designer cover the overview and explanation, and I handled the demo.

By pure fate, we presented last, and it felt like many teams did not really meet the given keywords.

That was a bit disappointing, but we received the Free Pass Award.

I am going to take a break from hackathons and work on a project… haha.