Done with Hackathon

My group and I had a tough time during the hackathon, as everyone of us had issue with trying to find the motivation to do our work. I felt like I was flooded with a lot of work to do, that when it came down to actually implementing our project codes, my hand just froze each time I tried, I took me a lot of effort to overcome this problem.

It is during this stressful times, where I learnt how an individuals mentality can affect the entire group if we do keep them in check. It is even more infectious especially when we are together and rushing the work and we do not realize it. For example, one of us announced that they are going to take a break, then the rest of us ended taking break as well cause of group mentality. We wasted quite of time doing so and it gave us more stress.

This hackathon is from 9am to 6pm, but we stayed over at one of groupmate's house in order to continue on with the group work. We worked on the project non-stop but progress for some reason kept moving super slowly and at that rate we couldn't foresee any working prototype to be done by the presentation day. I remember my brain kept wandering off during the those long sessions as I felt mental exhaustion especially when I was faced with perhaps what I consider a programmer's block? I couldn't code properly or even code at all, until at this point I took a break to adjust my mental state. After which then I could code. We had to pull an all-nighter before the presentation but some of us couldn't stay up all the day due to the exhaustion of having to endure for 2 days in a row.

When it was time for presentation, our prototype did not look good, it had a lot of problems and we had hardcode many features. A lot was reliant on the pitching rather than the demo itself. I was in-charge of handling the demo, one of the biggest difficulty was actually to run the demo while Tristan pitched at the same time, we had to do both concurrently due to time constraint and the amount of the content that we wanted to explain and the potential our ideas had.

After the presentation, we had another one which was at SAP. But we managed to relax a bit and catch a bit on sleep, however, the stress was still there as we had to improve on our presentation more and make sure that our presentation improves when we present in front of the many big shots that SAP invited.

When we arrived at the SAP office at Maple Tree Business City, the office design was quite nice, they had a lot cool looking chair and even a nice coffee machine and food. We managed to interact with quite a few of the people who were invited by SAP and had great discussions about our own project idea. When we actually presented in front of everyone, it was quite stressful but we managed to pull through. In the end, we managed to get 3rd place which was not that shabby though in our heart we felt we would get 2nd or 1st. But all is good, we managed to get a free Smartphone VR set for ourselves.