On October 21st I participated in the Hack Ohio 2017 event at the student. This is a 24 hour hackathon where you have the freedom to create anything you want. This ranges from software, to hardware, and also companies were on site to offer their own problems and you design the solutions. I went with two other guys who were also STEM EE scholars. We came with the intention to make a dating site for awkward people. After designing the java background, we had trouble implementing it into an HTML site. The idea was scrapped, I spent the next couple of hours going around and talking to all the different companies, and I designed a program where you type in what you’re looking for in a computer and it displays a list of possible models that you would like.
The biggest impact hackathon had on me wasn’t what I coded or attempted to do. I spent the majority of the time walking around and seeing what other people were creating. I thought I knew a decent amount of coding, but after seeing what other people were building, it was almost intimidating. For example the guys next to us were creating their own version of Google Glasses. Seeing all of these project both excited and intimidated me. I was intimidated because I realized that I had thought I knew a good amount of programming, but I have just scratched the surface of coding. However, this mostly excited me, because all of these guys were older than me, they’ve taken more classes, and more importantly, they’ve taken/are taking classes that I will take. Which means that in the not so distant future I’ll have the knowledge to build my own form of Google Glasses, or solve a company’s hack.
Although currently my team and I weren’t able to contribute to the hackathon in a way that we wanted too, it made us excited for the classes we’ll take in the future. So one day we can create something worth while at the event.