Aditya's Blog: Hacking at PennApps

Hi everyone!

My name is Aditya Chitnis and I have the privilege of attending PennApps, the nation's first (and quite possibly best) student-run college hackathon. The competition starts on September 4th and ends on September 6th (just in time for school to start too). In that time, a team of 3 or 4 members try to come up with a fun and innovative hack/app to impress the judges based on its technical difficulty, originality, polish, and usefulness.

Although it might sound daunting to try to come up with a brilliant idea and make it in such a short time, the mentors here try to get you on track as fast as possible, even if you have ZERO coding experience. Just look at their schedule:

The goal here really is to be able to make what you want and to meet amazing people who all share your same interest in hacking and coding! To top it all off, the whole event is FREE, yes FREE. PennApps has many sponsors who love to come out and see what students like you and me can do in such a short time. If all goes well, you might even get contacted/recruited by some of their sponsors like Intel, Github, Facebook, and Apple!

Well that's my little intro, see you next time!

9/5/15

Fifteen hours in and you can really feel the competition taking its toll on its competitors. It's about 5:00 am and there are still teams coding away as if it was 5 in the afternoon. Some teams decide to take their nights off to be refreshed for the next day and others decide to code through both the night and day to get as much progress as possible done.

Yesterday's opening was that of a HUGE expo with booths from all of PennApp's major sponsors, like Facebook, Google, Uber, Twilio, and Capital One (to name a small few). These booths not only showed off their own unique coding style to the participants, but they also gave away A LOT of free stuff. So much so, that Google even gave out giant laundry bags to hold everything from pillows to power adapters to water bottles to the massive amounts of t-shirts and stickers everyone gave. After a few hours of talking with the representatives of each company and attending interesting talks, we all went to the opening ceremony to learn more about the APIs each company had to offer and how we could take advantage of them for our projects.

[For those who do not know, APIs are basically code made by other people which can interact with your code to use another person's or company's services]

After the opening ceremony I met up with my team to discuss our idea and how we would go about doing it. In the end, we realized our first idea wouldn't be able to be demoed, so we tweaked it and are now going with an app to find local people in your area who want to play a pick-up game (basketball, ultimate frisbee, etc) with you and other locals. We're feeling confident in our ability to finish this app on time.

Wish us luck! Until next time!