Introduction
This weekend I attended the annual swamphacks Hackathon with the ACM chapter at the University of Central Florida. Our group had a plan and were ready to attack this hackathon, all we were waiting for was the challenges that sponsors had for the hackathon to get those sweet prizes. We knew we’d be using React for the frontend and ASP.NET Web API for the backend and had our github repository ready.
Beginning the Hackathon
The hackathon began at about 9pm on Friday January 18th. We began creating our application. We had decided to go with J.P. Morgan Chase’s challenge which was to solve the problem of food waste using open sourced data. Our idea was simple. An app where user’s can scan items that are nearing expiration and sell-by dates and bring them to a kiosk where they’ll be rewarded points to be used for prizes. Profit would be generated by money gained by tax incentives for food donations.
I began writing the backend and testing using Postman to make sample calls and make sure it was returning data correctly and completing requests correctly. Publishing was simple to do using the Azure and .NET toolset its just a couple clicks and your project is on the cloud and ready to be used by the rest of the team allowing for quick iterations up to the end where we needed to create a new request about 4 hours before the hackathon ended.
The frontend was the biggest struggle of them all. No one on the team had ever used React and we were aiming at learning it while there. Some of us had received a workshop on how React works and we thought we’d go ahead and apply it to a full project. My team-mate was all over it from the start and was implementing features left and right. By the time I finished the backend about 9 hours later he had spent a good portion of time in React. I jumped in and tried implementing new functions and creating a dashboard for users. I spent sooo much time just trying to implement something then giving up because it had taken 4 hours of my time already. Things like creating modals that can be toggled on and off and just general things took a significant amount of time. I did gain a deeper understanding of the framework and in the future I’d like to spend some time to create an actual project inside of React and use their features.
Snapchat Game
About 4 hours before the hackathon ended at 4 am I finally finished the enterprise dashboard for the web app and my team. I decided to create a game for the Snapchat SnapKit Challenge which rewarded the best use of their SDK. I didn’t see many other people going after the challenge so I decided to go for it. I made a quick Unity project found bitmoji sprites that would match output from the API had I had access to it and make a game with a 2D rigidbody and used the UI System to make the main menu. I used animators and triggers to animate the UI in a quick way and make it a linear and limited. The ragdoll is just set up with 2d Rigidbodies and hinge joints to keep them in place. To move the character I move his body object by adding force and random rotations.
I ended up winning the Snapchat challenge and winning a casio calculator watch.
Conclusion
All in all the hackathon was a fun experience and winning the Snapchat challenge was a great experience. I’d like to get more involved in hackathons as I move from doing game jams and creating products that will help me in my career.
