Hey everyone! I recently participated in my first-ever hackathon, and it was a wild 48 hours full of coding, creativity, and a lot of coffee. Let me take you through the journey!

The Setup

PeddieHacks 2024 was a weekend event, and the setup was pretty intense. Imagine dozens of teams, each with different ideas and only a limited time to bring them to life. We had to form teams before the themes were even announced. I ended up in a group of four strangers after messaging a complete stranger on Discord, who then brought in the rest of the members. It was quite the start!

Choosing the Theme

The themes were announced during the opening ceremony of the hackathon. The organizers introduced the event and then revealed the themes: one option was Music, and the other was Travel. Being somewhat into music, I was instantly drawn to the Music theme. However, despite this initial excitement, We struggled to come up with ideas to pitch to my team.

Brainstorming Ideas

On our first call, it seemed like everyone was ignoring the Travel theme and was more inclined towards Music. After rejecting a couple of ideas, we finally landed on a concept that got us all excited: a TikTok-style platform, but for beats. And since it's the era of AI, we thought, why not include AI-generated beats?

Building the Project

With the idea in place, we split the tasks into teams of two. I took on the job of building the UI for the app. As I dived into development, I stumbled upon the Web Audio API, which was a whole new area for me to explore. Since my teammates were in different time zones, I ended up working solo during the day, creating the website UI and developing a beat visualizer using HTML Canvas.

The AI Model Development

At night, we'd regroup on Discord to share updates. The AI team had almost completed the model to generate beats. Although the initial results were amusing (imagine a 2-year-old with a drum pad and an ear-piercing microphone), some of the samples were quite promising!

The Final Sprint

After a productive night, I went to sleep, and by the time I woke up, the AI model was completed. My task was to link the backend to the frontend, which I quickly managed to do. My partner had been working on the Flask backend, so we were ready to go.

With just two hours left before the submission deadline, we realized we needed to put together a presentation and prepare for a potential live demo if we were selected. We hastily created the presentation, practiced who would say what, and submitted our project just in time.

The Presentation

To our excitement, we were shortlisted for the live presentation! I was tasked with showing the project demo, and although I was quite anxious (never having spoken in front of a group before), everything went surprisingly well. The judges were impressed with our presentation, and we answered their questions confidently.

The Results

After thanking my teammates for their incredible teamwork, we anxiously awaited the results, which were announced at 3 AM my time. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but the experience was invaluable. Working with strangers, collaborating as a team, and building something from scratch was an amazing learning opportunity.

Conclusion

That was my journey through my first hackathon! It was a fun and challenging experience that pushed me to learn from others and grow as a developer. If you enjoyed reading about my journey, feel free to hit the thumbs up and drop a comment on what we could have done better. Until then, keep coding and keep learning! See you in the next post.

Demo of the app we made

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