DAY 1:

Waking up was extra rough this morning (Being out until 3am doesn’t help), but it was the first day of the Hackathon. I woke up a passed my alarm clock, but I eagerly got up and ran downstairs just in time to trek to Big Radical. I know there were some people a little peeved by this impromptu Hackathon, but I was overall excited to see how an agency works and to dip my toes in UX. Although I was excited, I was also a little nervous due to my huge lack of UI/UX experience, but it only motivated me to learn and perform to my best ability. Getting there I was teamed up with Otto and Steven, which gave me comfort because we all had tons of strengths that would easily help us collaborate together. I was also paired with David, Yihan and our team leader Anna who were in business, data analytics, and marketing. Interestingly enough we all meshed and our ideas were flowing. After 9 exhausting hours of brainstorming we were finally able to conjure up an interesting idea that utilizes Augmented Reality to tackle depression. After a couple beers, we all went to the hotel where everyone pretty much just relaxed after a very demanding day.

DAY 2:

This morning I woke up on time  and got a full breakfast. I was super excited for day 2 because, it was time to make our idea come to life. As soon as we arrived, we split into our teams and started working. Otto, Steven, and I worked on prototyping while our other teammates worked on the presentations and the analytics on how this product would work and effect the public. While 9 hours seems like an immense amount of time we slowly realized it wasn’t. We were working very quickly, which made me learn a lot on the fly about UI/UX at a rate I’ve never before. As the hours went by we finally developed our platform, “Chat Cloud”, and presented it to the judges. Overall this was an amazing experience and I would love to participate in more Hackathons in the future.