Today, I started writing a small article about HackCU’s registration platform. However, I realized that there was no context. I started to write the context and ended up with this. Hope you enjoy it!

Around two years ago, I joined for the first time an organizational meeting for the first edition of HackUPC. It was fantastic… I felt stupid.

It all started because a friend of mine mentioned that she was helping organize a local hackathon. I immediately felt jealous. That sounded so cool. I asked her to introduce me to whoever was running it. And so, after a couple of meetings and insisting a lot, I was in.

At first, I told them that I wanted to contribute to the tech aspect. I was working as a web developer intern at my university and I thought I understood this world. Oh boy, how wrong I was. After the first meeting as a WebDev, I realized how far I was from all those people. All I could do was to fix a small bug on the website to avoid horizontal scrolling. They could write faster code, cleaner code, traveled to a ton of hackathons, coded in a ton of languages, all of them were way better than me. And so my reaction was to change my work area. I wanted to make myself useful in some other way, if web development was not possible, then I had to find something else in which I could be useful.

I went to HackUPC’s director and asked him if there were any other “openings”. He told me that Logistics was empty. He warned me that directing the Logistics department required a lot of work and responsibility. After some thought, I decided to go for it. I thought that, if I wanted to get better, I needed to challenge myself to do something totally new. So I jumped in.

Another guy in the same CS year than me joined Logistics department. We both shared the title of Logistics co-director. He had been to a couple of hackathons before, unlike me, I had been to none. I had zero experience in the hackathon world. I felt frustrated.

This time, instead of giving up, I decided to work harder. If they had experience, well, I had to learn. I quickly started to review other hackathons: study their websites, watch videos of their opening and closing ceremonies, understand hackathons the best I could.

The director started throwing tasks at us. I have to admit, at the beginning I was afraid we would not be able to keep up. We had a ton of work! We had to hire catering for over 400 people, get a venue where everyone could fit, prepare the ceremonies, plan 36 hours of talks, hacking and side events, coordinate 20 volunteers… It was a rush of adrenaline.

The night before the event, I went to sleep at 3 AM. It was not because of work. It was me being excited. I think I had never felt like this before.

The day arrived. We started really early setting up the sports center and the classrooms. We improvised a lot. The registration table was moved once or twice until we found a suitable location. And when the hackers arrived, we were exhausted already. I will never be able to thank the whole team and volunteers that made it possible enough.

It was something bigger than ourselves. We were there to change people’s life. And we did. We changed our university environment. We helped some people find a motivation.

From time to time, during the event, I’d wander around the classrooms to take a break. The passion I could feel… It was unbelievable. Even now, when I’m trying to write all this down, I can’t find the words to describe it. The projects were mind-blowing. I had read a lot about hackathon but I would have never thought that any of that could possibly be done under 36 hours. But they did.

I learned a lot from that experience:

  • Surround yourself with people smarter than you. Motivate yourself to step up your game.
  • It’s okay to feel stupid, but it’s not a reason to give up. If you put your mind and body to it, you can do it.
  • You can change the world. Sometimes you think that changing the world means changing the entire world. Not true, you can change the world step by step.
  • Jump into challenges. They make life exciting and that’s where you will grow as a person.
  • Go to hackathons. You’ll apply all of the above at the same time!

When the hackathon ended, I felt exhausted. And yet, I couldn’t stop smiling away. That day I knew. I knew that I had a new addiction: hackathons.

After that, I became co-director of the second edition of HackUPC, coordinated the tech team at HackUPC, hacked in 6 hackathons around the world, moved to the US and joined HackCU, joined their tech team and developed a hackathon registration platform from scratch. But that’s all for another day, for another story.

Photos by Maud-Sophie Andrieux-Laclavetine, courtesy of Major League Hacking