first ever hackathon, cruzhacks

 


So this weekend hosted by UCSC's CruzHacks, my team attended CruzHacks 2025. It was a really fun experience where going into it I didn't know what to expect. This really isn't my niche, as when it comes to coding I'm mainly an expert on the algorithms & data structures aka competitive programming. It involves solving algorithmic problems, writing solutions, optimizing them for the time constraints and test cases, and a lot of practice and studying and preparation. And so it's quite different and quite sweaty, and it was really cool to experience these hackathons which is this different side of programming. ICPC stuff and the performance is also way more measurable than hackathons, where theres a lot more creativity and flexibility involved. Surprisingly this is my first ever hackathon, despite almost like every cs kid doing one in high school and stuff.  

Our team was me, my housemate named evan, and a friend named austin. We didnt have a 4th. The venue was the civic auditorium center which is not in campus and instead in downtown which is pretty close to my place. Here I will be wrapping up how the hackathon went thru the 3 days and talking about my experience.

Friday

Got there at like 4:10 PM or something, I thought there was gonna be a super long line in the checkin but there wasnt. Grabbed the badge, a lot of stickers and walked in and found my friend raymons group and yeah here we were. We had absolutely nothing right now, and so we began setting up the github, the vscode liveshare, and brainstorming ideas. There was no wifi when we got here and there wouldnt be wifi this day which was super frustrating and a great way to intorduce a literal hackathon. anyway Austin 'thought of' a posture checker application and i figured it was a cool idea and i couldn't really think of anything else. Like thinking of an application idea is one of those things where you have those creative surges when youre trying to fall asleep, or taking a shower, or in the car. Just times where you are alone with your thoughts and just you yapping and thiking about things. So yeah next time I go into a hackathon I should begin brainstorming like a week before or something and thinking about it and writing stuff down on a notepad because like bruh. Anyway we ended up settling on this posture idea which is not bad and do-able.

I also found out that when the hackathon was about to start that some teams already finished their product and im just like huh? I was always under this impression that the hackathon has a topic or something announced in the beginning to ensure that everyone starts at the same time like a hackathon is supposed to be and here we have teams left and right who already finished their app and literally dipped at like 8 pm after dinner like holdup i need to talk about this. Like this is so mickey like it makes the whoel hackathon feel so fradulent and all of a sudden our team who this is our first hackathon and we are at a disadvantage and under this massive time pressure while other teams just pulled up to the venue to cop the free food and maybe pretend theyre working on their project and then dip like maybe all hackathons arent like this but fundamentally speaking bro you have to make a topic or announce the prize categories right when the hackathon starts and make it a secret before. This sht was so mickey it actually pissed me off like when the announcer said "let the hacking begin" it held absolutely 0 meaning.

Dinner was ikes sandwiches which was fire, after we got our firsts, we rubbed off the sharpie on our badge and went in again to cop seconds but the staff was someone we knew and he was an op and didnt let us like bruh lmao but they ended up having an insane amount of excess sandwiches and at one point they were just like "just take as much as you want" so i sprinted over there and literally grabbed like 5 sandwiches lmao this was our total haul with raymons group:


This stuff is like 40 dollars worth of value of sandwiches bro and there were ppl who took entire boxes of sandwiches lmao so day 1 was off to a really great start. We left at like 10 pm or something i dont remember but I went to bed at like 1 AM after a discord vc with my group to talk about our plan for tomorrow and finalizing our ideas.

Saturday

Woke up at like 10 AM or something and austin picked us up and when we got to the hackathon venue there was no wifi again like it was super slow like are you serious? This is so shameless and embarassing like they had like 7 different networks prepared and somehow like they all broke or something and the main wifi had like a queue for it and im pretty sure that still didnt work and this is literally a hackathon like holy cow how does a hackathon have no wifi. We literally got no work done as the hotspots were slow and bro like this is actually so cringe. Lunch was woodstocks pizza which was ok i ate like 4 slices of pepperoni i shoudlve got the combo one. But like I lowkey shoudlnt have ate 4 slices cuz I shoudlve saved room for panda express dinner. Anyway it was like 1 PM and we were so frustrated we literally took our monitor and all our stuff and walked to the santa cruz public library across the street and it was there that we got a lot of work done. Me and evan had this nice 2 hour stretch where we coded up a lot of the gemini requests and he worked on the opencv and got it working and this was when we first made actual progress and had those moments of joy when we got things to work. At like 5 PM the library closed so we walked back to the venue AND THE WIFI WAS STILL OUT BRO. I literally ask the staff and theyre like "we will be installing verizon routers at 4 corners of the venue i am sorry" and after like 10 min they got these verizon routers up and we finally got wifi at the evening of day 2 like wow this is so embarassing dude like we literally got no work done until we finally got wifi at the library it was seriously so frustrating u dont understand.

Then we had dinner which was panda express and it was good they catered like everything they had the orange chicken, sesame chicken, tofu and eggplant, beijing beef. And they had fried rice and chow mein. They ended up having an insane excess of food again partly because like half the participants were here because they either already finished their project like last month lmao or they left because the wifi was ltierally aids but anyway they were literally saying we can take the trays of orange chicken and fried rice lmao so evan took a tray of fried rice and they had takeout boxes and i made 2 takeout boxes and absolutely stuffed it with orange chicken and beef like at this point I already had like enough meals stashed for the entire week. Like this made the whole wifi and people cheating part worth it because like idc anymore im pulling up next year because this is literally free meal prep like this is better than EBT lowkey.

Anyway after dinner we worked on it some more until like 10 PM, worth mentioning that this guy evan spent like an hour debugging why his windows system wasnt receiving a notification for testing our application when i discovered that he literally had do not disturb on like how do u not notice that bro i was in tears that sht was so funny, then we went home and reset as we were really tired from all the coding. I went on a run and took a shower and felt refreshed.


This is my 2nd time going on a run during the night and the google pixel night sight feature is so fire like look at that light house and look at that moon.

Anyway we ended up discord vc'ing for like 6 hours or something, it was until 6 AM when the sun was almost coming back up. We got a lot of work done as I mean the deadline was at 9 AM. It was so funny like we had like 4 different crash outs and it was like 5 AM when we were writing the devpost and I just started yelling at Austin in the discord vc because he kept trying to deepseek simple passages for no reason lmao we literally bullshtted the devpost so much, looking back we lowkey shoudlve taken that more seriously because i think the judges look at it. Like bro that discord vc was so brainrot lmao we were crashing out so much and we did so much work, like from 1-3 AM me and evan had this insane debugging session when we were trying to fix our buffer and send PIL images to google gemini and the chemistry was ABSOLUTELY off the charts like we were literally prime wade and bron lmao. Yeah a lot of memories in this hackathon it was really fun and brainrot, i understand why ppl do them a lot now.

Sunday

So I go to bed at like 6:30 and wake up at like 9:40 or something i forgot what time exactly but I snoozed the alarm like 3 times so I actually got up at like 10 AM lmao and now its Sunday even tho its been sunday for like 10 hours. When we got there there was still some bagels breakfast left so we ate that and then we had the judging period. The first judge was pretty bad because we didnt do a test run and when we connected it to the monitor our application was like lagging and the notification didnt even pop up because of the monitor being connected for some reaosn lmao it was super awkward cuz we said that our application gives a desktop notification when it literally didnt in our demo and in my head im just like wtf is going on. The 2nd judge was really good tho, this time I demo'd and evan did the explaining and we disconnected the monitor and the slides for our demo and it was good. But yeah that 1st judge was pretty bad experience like definitely below average and we shoudlve done a more formal test run and yeah at htis point im thinking that its unlikely our application will win any award but its all fine. 

Anyway then it was greek food lunch and by this time we were watching the warriors clippers game on the monitor and it was a really good game. When norman powell hit that 3 to end off the half it was super hype I was like yelling in the venue lmao and dapping up this clippers fan and staring down all the warriors fans like we had a whole watch party at this point it was pretty fun. During the 4th quarter I went on a walk with evan and raymon to CVS and when i got back there was like 1 min left in the game and the awards ceremony finally started but some ppl didnt care because the warriors game went OT and it was really intense and back and forth but in the end LETS GO THE CLIPPERS WON LMAO AND THE WARRIORS LOST LETS GO i really need the warriors to get bounced out of tehse playins bro PLEASE DOWNFALL PLEASE DOWNFALL.




Nothing notable happened during awards ceremony, we didnt win anything and I was a bit disappointed but like we did not deserve to win especially with how that first judge went but Im relaly proud of our team and our resilience and all that corny sht like we really did do it like it was a really meaningful experience we built a project and it was legit like not some mickey gpt wrapper and im really proud of the work we did and im really proud of the work I did. I haven't done much full stack coding lately so I really learned a lot and I'm really glad I attended this event. 



You can see I stashed 2 panda express trays, we have like 10 ikes sandwiches like theres 5 of them wrapped in the paper towels, i also stashed one of the greek food meals because they had a lot of extra. The panda express fried rice trays is not pictured but bro we are definitely not finishing that lmao. 

Conclusion

SO I wrote a lot like I did not expect to write this much like everytime I write a blog post I say imma just summarize it very minimally but then I get into things and I start yapping like crazy and then there goes like 2 hours out my day yippee but that was my experience at cruzhacks. 


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