Orange Juice Hologram
In terms of success, my hackathon experience can be described by the capital letter ‘U’.
U
The upper left corner of the ‘U’ is the first time I attended a hackathon and we definitely started out really strong. This was DubHacks 2018, and somehow, our shabby team of Freshman managed to sneak into the finalist round.
Yes, that’s us presenting our project, and that pie chart you see? It’s completely static. (🤫)
This was the birth of DubsDining, and since then, we hit a long dry spell of results despite the seemingly progressive approach of our team names: DubsDining 2.0, 3.0, … I think we even hit 7.0?
To be fair, we were probably optimizing fun instead of project submission rate. Up in Canada, we crashed Jake’s cousin’s apartment! (Big s/o for their hospitality :))
all smiles at NWHacks @ UBC
definitely working hard here
DubHacks 2018
DubHacks 2019
For the record, a lot of these photos were taken before the event really got started, before all the indecision trying to settle on a project idea and before the lack of sleep starts compromising our immune systems.
I like the smiles though.
During this most recent hackathon though, Hack’20, we wanted to optimize instead for success. After all, covid meant that the event was virtual so there wasn’t all the free swag and food that could distract us. Initially, we were planning to create a puzzle solver, but it turns out the technology already exists and it’s a solved problem. (It’s called Zolver and it’s actually pretty cool. A little slow, but optimizing existing solutions isn’t particularly innovative.)
So during another brain storm session, I remembered these weird DIY holograms I had seen in a YouTube thumbnail but that I had disregarded as clickbait. We figured we’d give it a shot, creating this thing called a pepper’s cone out of a recycled plastic orange juice bottle, and it actually worked pretty well.
what our quick little build actually looked like
And so began orange juice hologram.
Since we weren’t optimizing for entertainment, we ended up pretty dead tired, but we finally ended our project submission dry spell and had some pretty awesome results (devpost link!).
Yes, the demo video in the devpost link is pretty scuffed… sorry! We did it in one take at 11:30 and submission was due by 12. Thankfully, we got another try attempt during the finalist presentations!
Cool, we won!… so what did we win?
We got to donate $300 to a charity of our choice, and additionally, we got to meet with Ben Gilbert, the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs.
absorbing some knowledge
Most of all, it’s nice to finally have some results.