Rethinking the way I look at hackathons…

I’m writing this on my flight to San Francisco for Bitrig Hacks…

Last year, at the beginning of September, I went to my first-ever “real” hackathon. By real, I’m referring to a hackathon that was about building projects, not one that was leetcode/competitive programming. I’ve been to a total of 7 hackathons since then. I won my first three, and then never again—here’s what I realized…

Uno

For the first one, I found a local hackathon happening in LA during my second week after moving here. I knew I had to go. I blasted the link to everyone I met during freshmen welcome week, and two of them ended up coming along. I had a few ideas of what I wanted to build, but the intention was always to have fun, and not to win. One of my friends, Rehaan, wanted to build something that allowed you to visualise the contributions of your local city representatives—on a map. And that we did. I enjoyed the day thoroughly, I obsessed over every line of code I wrote, cared about the little details, worked with my teammates, shared laughs, and enjoyed the free food and merch we got. I explored MapKit and learnt about GeoJSON—things I had barely worked with before. Somehow, at the end of the day, we walked out with the #1 award.

Dos

The second hackathon, too, was hosted by the same organisation—at the end of September. The theme was “community.” And, quite frankly, I had no idea what I would build that would have fit the prompt. I remember telling my friends with me that “I’m just going to use this hackathon as a coworking space for me to build an idea I’ve had for a while, and enjoy the food for the day.” It didn’t really have a direct connection to community. This hackathon is when I built ARScribe, the live transcription app for Xreal glasses. Started from scratch in the morning, and was delighted by the result at the end of the day—I had an augmented reality live transcription app that ran completely on device, and it worked. I got to use the new OS 26 framework for SpeechAnalyzer and integrate it with my past work with the iOS 18 Translation framework, and also came up with a novel way to present separate UI on the XReal Glasses and the iPhone that powered them. I somehow managed to, during my pitch, say something along the lines of “without communication, there is no community.” I guess that worked… I ended up winning not just #1 overall, but 3 out of the 4 tracks they had. 🙃

Tres

For my third hackathon: it was one being hosted at USC. Again, I had had an idea sitting at the back of my mind even before I stepped foot on campus: an enhanced dining hall experience for USC (and other universities). The goal was to have an integrated AI assistant that would model your diet around your goals, but I ended up compromising and building only the foundation for that—I built what was simply a better version of the USC dining hall website—with the newly released Liquid Glass, a native experience, and experimented with web scraping. I ended up winning the “Most Viable Product” award and won a pair of AirPods. Funnily enough, someone else who won “The best use of lovable” got a Quest 3S and ended up exchanging it with me—so I ended up with a Quest for free!

The doomed "win streak."

Later that same month, I was heading to Calhacks. At this point though, something changed. I now was on this “three win streak”—and being the numbers guy I sometimes am—I was desperate to continue it. I teamed up with some friends, and we did have fun, but we sweat it out a little too much. Instead of taking risks and trying something new out, we chose the safer route and tried making something that maximises our chances of winning. We started optimizing for “sponsormaxxing” and trying to use a little bit of every sponsor there was, in an attempt to qualify for their winning prize. I also started using AI agents to help with the code a bit more—while not a complete abandonment of my craft, it was still a departure from my usual deeply obsessive approach to building software. Clearly, this was not a strategy that was going to win—and indeed, we didn’t. By the end of it, we were also burnt out.

HackIllinois, DiamondHacks, LAHacks… the same thing kept on happening. It’s not like these weren’t ideas I cared about, but because “vibe-coding”, winning, “sponsormaxxing” became more important, I had started caring less about how we built software at hackathons, and it showed. The first three apps from the hackathons, I still use, and they have evolved from their original form. This is posible because their code wasn’t drenched in APIs from sponsors I didn’t care about, and it was code that was written with care. The other four projects? They were mostly forgotten about. Even though they were cool ideas, continuing the project meant I would have to spend considerable time rewriting it—because the code itself was unusable beyond a good demo.

There is a clear distinction to be made here. The first three hackathons were about building something I wanted, and then fitting it into the prompt. The last four were about fitting the prompts into my project—and it absolutely did not work.

What now?

I want to go back to how I went to that first hackathon a year ago: not expecting—or even wanting—to win. I want to care about the project we build because we’re in love with the idea of it, not because we love the prize that comes after we win it. I want to walk out, knowing I had fun with my teammates, knowing I enjoyed the free food, and that I genuinely had a good time. I want hackathons to be excuses for projects I have always wanted to build, not places where I have to come up with unnecessary “winning ideas.” I want to make something unique, something that stands out. Maybe I’ll end up winning? But if I don’t, at least I’ll have something to cherish.

I’m writing this, as I mentioned in the opening, on my flight to Bitrig Hacks. Paradoxically, it is a four hour hackathon—with the absolute expectation of vibe coding. The prize is an iPhone Duo, a phone I’m in love with. And after the hackathon, a question I will surely be asked is: “did you win?” Despite these things that may deter me from what I said earlier, my goal today is to care about the process, to try to have fun, to experiment, to obsess over the details as much as I can—even with the constraint of vibe-coding—and if there’s one thing I want to avoid caring about: it’s winning the prize. As I’ve always loved to say: it’s all about the journey, not the destination.