I had always wanted to attend a Hackathon ever since I started seriously programming 2 years ago. Just the thought of helping to develop something awe inspiring was fascinating to me. At the same time, I was deathly afraid of making a fool out of myself. I had horrible thoughts of being kicked out a group of angry developers for not being “up to par”. So when I found out about the first WWC Hackathon being held in Atlanta GA, I was excited and terrified at the same time.
Of course my excitement won out and I visited the website to register but the price was a blow to my pocketbook. I was a little let down for sure. Thankfully, that evening I read in the monthly newsletter that I could apply for a free ticket. I did and luckily I was granted a ticket!
Now I was now back to being terrified but I decided I was going to go for it. What’s the worst that could happen?
After a long day at work I was anxious to see how the whole process would work out since I didn’t have much time to think of how I could contribute my skills or any clue of how to pitch ideas to group. What awaited me when I first arrived were a lot of happy, excited women and delicious drinks and appetizers. Ok..I was relaxed..now what? As I sat together with all the other women in the “pitching room”, I could sense the excitement and passion from everybody. There were so many good ideas that my head was spinning. I finally settled in with the Legendary Sensors which was perfect for me since I was fascinated with IoT. We were all pretty new to IoT in general so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to be a working genius on the subject. We all just had fun playing around with the boards and seeing if we could get anything actually working. Our goal was to make a temperature sensor that could be used in fuel farms to make sure that pipes were functioning properly and adjust themselves if necessary by having the sensors placed directly on the pipe. After a lot of research, discussion and playing with the board, we finally got it working and understood a lot more about fuel farms than we ever imagined.
After a wonderful breakfast, we were back at it as a group refining our research and trying to get the board to be more functional. We successfully got the temperature to display correctly in the application and record temperature changes based on direct contact with board. With that done we started collecting the data, researching the success of a fully functional application and investigating competition in the marketplace for our new company. This lasted well into the evening. After a wonderful dinner and full stomach it was time for me to call it a night.
When I woke up the next morning I was a little apprehensive and excited at the same time. I knew we had been working on something extremely useful and innovative, but now we had to make others believe it as well. As a team we began perfecting our slideshow and group presentation, we were feeling very good about how far we had gotten and how much fun we had learning something new. After a wonderful bbq dinner, all of the teams gathered together and started presenting their projects. All the participants were delighted and amazed at each teams hard work and passion for their project. There were speeches, laughs,gasps and photo ops all around because each project was so amazing. Every team deservedly won something and all good time was had by everyone. Just being a part of something so awesome was life altering for me. I was so impressed with the organization and dedication from all of the staff, volunteers, mentors and judges involved in the event. When I started on Friday I had no idea what to expect. By Sunday night I was even more excited about the choice I made to become a developer and grateful that WWC was going to be by my side every step of the way.