I joined the Build-A-Block hackathon two months into my 1st sem at UPV, my very first hackathon. My teammates were all upclass, and I was the only freshie. The challenge: improve event management at the university, requirements given, everything else up to us.
The morning started with a workshop on Next.js and Firebase, learn in the morning, build in the afternoon. So this was also my first time touching that stack. I mostly worked on the frontend, though hackathons don’t really care about job descriptions. If something breaks, you fix it.
What caught me off guard was collaboration. I already knew Git well enough for my own projects, but working the same codebase with 4 other people was different. Suddenly there were PRs, merge conflicts, multiple people touching the same files. At one point we had so many conflicts I said “can’t we just push straight to main” lol.
Working with people more experienced than me taught me a lot, but learning went both ways too. I introduced them to Tailwind and other UI libraries, which was apparently new to them.
By the end of the day, we had a working prototype to demo.
Looking back, the few hundred pesos from winning isn’t what’s worth it. It’s how much I learned in a single day surrounded by people better than me. It made me want to do another hackathon.