Hackathon Part 1

Before I start, I would like to put up a disclaimer. I love all my friends very much, and I understand that conflicts within a group is inevitable and is part of the process. However, during the hackathon I wanted to stab myself and my teammates so badly like I can't even being to express the frustration and tiredness we all felt during the hackathon.

Firstly, we started off on the wrong note. Everyone was too chill, and in hindsight I guess we really didn't take things as seriously as we should have. We overestimated the time we had, and we underestimated the tasks we had yet to accomplish. I was feeling fairly trashy prior the start of the hackathon as I had work and was severely tired. Furthermore, I was having a designer's block and could not conjure a good enough design for the website. It didn't help that I kept having mini panic attacks every single time I encountered an issue or minor setback while coding the html.

Progress for me was ridiculously slow as well, still being a little rusty with html and css. I had to refer on and off to tutorials to accomplish the simplest tasks. For example, I wanted two of my elements to overlaps, but I wanted the first one to overlap the second. It was just a matter of adjusting the z-index, but my skills being so rusty, I actually spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to search how to do such a basic task.

I also felt that my group was disorganised as we did not set clear, distinct goals for ourselves that had to be accomplished by a certain time. I'm fairly certain this is what led to our downfall and not producing a high quality product by the time we had to pitch. All we knew was that we had to finish the web application. However, we had no timeline, so it was really easy for us to overestimate the time we had left.

The lack of organisation and coordination also led to long periods of times where at least one person would not be doing anything. An example I vaguely remember was the issue of coding the backend, which could not be done as the database was not yet done. Another example was when two of my teammates were supposed to be working on the database but one of them could not proceed until the other had accomplished a particular task. Overall, we were not very efficient as a team and it definitely contributed to the fact that we did not finish on time.

I felt that we were also fairly distracted.

At this point, tensions were quite high, but mostly on my side. I was worried we wouldn't finish on time, and stressed that no one else seemed to be worried. This did lead to a bit of conflict and unhappiness between me and my teammates. However, we talked about it after the hackathon and it was resolved quickly. We discussed what were the things that made us unhappy, and what were the things that led to low productivity.

This discussion only took place after the hackathon, however, and you will see in the next post regarding the hackathon that things generally worsened on the second day.