Hackathon Part 2

The second day of the hackathon was honestly one of the most frustrating points in my entire life. I was ready to throw hands at anyone and everyone who disturbed me while I was busy typing away trying to come bring my designs to life.

You'd think we would have learnt from our mistakes the previous day but no, and the same thing happened again: distracted, disorganised, and lack of coordination. There were moments where I felt like I wasn't being taken seriously by some of my teammates when I exhibited stress and worry about not being able to produce quality work.

As the UI/UX designer and front-end developer, I wasn't really directly affected by the lack of coordination we had as a group. It was mostly the back-end coders that were affected. However, I knew that we were a team, and if one of us wasn't able to complete our assigned tasks in time, then we wouldn't be able to produce a finished product. Hence, I was worried despite the fact that I always had something to do; which was to code the front-end, adding the necessary labels, buttons, text inputs, etc etc for the back-end coders to settle later on.

It was at this point, yet again, I realised a flaw in our system.

With the database not yet up and running, and with the front-end not done, our back-end coder had periods of times where there was simply nothing he could do. This was the point where I started to feel immense guilt for not being good enough and fast enough. Eventually, at the end of the day, we decided to scrape system admin and medical personnel side, simply sticking to showing out main civilians' UI. The lack of time finally dawned on everyone, and we were finally all on the same page. We went home and coded as much as we could until morning. I didn't sleep or even nap. I just wanted to finish the html and do a little bit of CSS if time allowed. I was seriously disappointed in myself, as aesthetically speaking, the website looked like utter trash. It was below my standard, and I regret spending so much time at work and not enough time on schoolwork.

I also felt like we could have done better had we been more organised and coordinated.