My First Hackathon

“Dubstech is the University of Washington's largest tech community aimed at helping students learn about tech and grow their tech presence. We organize a variety of open to all tech-themed workshops, competitions, talks and produce digital news content. Irrespective of their major, background or skill level, everyone is welcome at our events”

November 2018 I decided to take part at Dubstech hackathon for the first time at University of Washington Seattle, I was all ready with my laptop, sketch book and some pencils like I was on a war to  build something for social good. I knew I had to stay straight four hours at the hackathon!

What I learned and how I worked at hackathon

Strategy Strategy and Strategy!

I worked in a team of two, met my teammate at hackathon and partnered as a team analyzed the requirements and divided the four hours according to the process we were going to follow along the road and having to restrict up to six slides as required was a challenge.

I could see members from other team jump directly into building the product, for a second, I doubted if we were able to reach until the end of building the prototype but I knew it was about explaining to ourselves and others about Why we followed certain methods and implemented certain design patterns in the prototype hence strongly stuck to the plan as planned.

As a team, me and my teammate had different concepts and ideas. We tried to filter the best and implement what could work. Hence we brainstormed and created persona followed by contextual scenarios on sticky notes and using a software tool called Lucid diagram, and sketched our ideas on paper having totally different ideas respectively, we did have a few debates ?? and questioned “Why” many a times as a team. The one who had the logical reasoning won the debate ?? having logical reasoning we both agreed to the final design and implemented the designs on sketch with IOS interactive user Interface.

Finally, we had to explain our design and concepts to others were me and my teammate took rounds explaining to the people who visited our booth and got the chance to walk around and hear others design decision and learn more about their inspiration.

I look forward to taking part in more of such hackathon to learn, compete and win some of the design challenges.