Hacking it.

This weekend I took part in my first Hackathon. It was also the first time I’ve really worked with others to build a project since graduating Flatiron’s Software Engineering bootcamp. This particular Hackathon was virtual, conducted entirely through Zoom and Slack, and on the smaller side. It was an invitation from a former Flatiron instructor to his previous students, showcasing a full stack framework he had recently built called Triframe. I want to spend time writing about the framework, and its complexities, but I’ll save that for another blog. Instead, for this writing, I’ll focus on my experience and what I learned in general over the course of the weekend.

Because this was a new framework, leading up to the Hackathon, we had the opportunity to attend three live lectures over Zoom to learn the basics and play with the basic functionality before we kicked off our projects. We were also able to join or pick teams ahead of time, which gave us plenty of time to discuss a plan going into the weekend, something I think was very beneficial to make the weekend go as smoothly as it did.

While it was a little difficult to pin down people to commit an entire weekend, I was able to recruit one person early on and we were able to discuss a simple plan for a fun and lightweight app that lent itself to what we understood the strengths of the framework to be.

In the end, I ended up with two other members on my team, over a year into their coding careers. I was excited to get them on my team as they were both much more experienced than I was. As we got into the project, they did not disappoint, their experience letting them quickly fall into a flow of building out our frontend components for our app. Meanwhile, I was tasked to build out our backend models and methods. I was pleasantly surprised with how well we all worked with each other. As I wrote out the backend methods, I wasn’t sure how readable my code was for other programmers, and while I documented where I thought it might be ambiguous, there were very few spots where they had to come back to me and ask me about the methods as they built out the components that used them.

Not everything went so smooth though. The day before the Hackathon, I came down with a cold, that, while not severe was enough to keep me out of staying up as late as my teammates to work on the codebase. Meanwhile, one of my teammates had an installation issue with Postgresql that took most of the first day to resolve, leaving us quite a bit behind on our goals going into the second day.

Because this was a new framework, there were also some bugs that went along with it. Some of the bugs the developer had to hunt down and fix real time, which impressively, he did. Others were due to us not quite understanding the built in methods. But here again, was another place I was surprised to see how well and quickly my Flatiron training kicked in. After a moment of panic due to our ticking clock and time we’d already wasted, I went back to my roots of looking over the method, reading the error code, seeing where it pointed to, and tracing it back. And I had a blast doing it.

And, despite all our problems and delays, we got it done. With 2 minutes before project presentations were to begin, we got our app deployed to Heroku and verified it was working.

While we didn’t win, and in spite of feeling sick throughout, this was a great experience that I look forward to doing again. I learned a lot in the process. Not just about the new framework, but that I can trust my own skills more. Working with more experienced devs, I was able to hold my own with meaningful contributions. It gave me a much needed confidence boost as I look at completely flipping my career into something new. And, as a bonus, I really like this new framework and want to build out new apps with it in the future.

But more on that next time.