I joined the Build-A-Block hackathon about two months into my 1st sem at UPV.
It was my very first hackathon. My teammates were all upclass, and I was the only freshie.
The challenge was about improving event management at the university. We had a set of requirements to work with, but we were free to decide what to build.
The morning started with a workshop on Next.js and Firebase. The whole point was to learn the stack in the morning, then spend the afternoon building with it. So my first hackathon also became my first time building with that stack.
I mostly worked on the frontend, although hackathons don’t really care about job descriptions. If something breaks, you fix it. If someone needs help, you help. Everyone ends up touching a bit of everything.
What caught me off guard wasn’t the coding. It was the collaborating.
I already knew Git well enough for my own projects, but working on the same codebase with 4 other people was a completely different experience. Suddenly there were PRs, merge conflicts, and multiple people changing the same files at once.
At one point we had so many merge conflicts that I even said “can’t we just push straight to main” lol.
Working with people who had more experience than I did taught me a lot. But it also reminded me that learning goes both ways. For example, I introduced them to Tailwind, which apparently was new to them.
By the end of the day, we had a working prototype to demo.
Looking back, the few hundred pesos I earned from winning isn’t what’s worth it. It’s how much I learned in a single day surrounded by people who are better than me.
More than anything, it made me want to do another hackathon.