Bitcamp is the University of Maryland’s premier hackathon, bringing together over 1,400 students, making it the largest collegiate hackathon on the East Coast. I am a software developer on the tech team.
Accomplishments So Far
- Built Registration App with Vue.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB
- Form logic + design
- Built website with Vue.js
Working on the EXPO app
This is a story version. I will have an update with more technical details soon.
This year, UMD’s Bitcamp hackathon team wanted to do something new. Every year has been an iterative improvement over the previous year, but for 2023, we wanted to do something more than just an incremental upgrade. As part of the group’s tech team, we decided to design a new platform that would handle project judging in order to award prizes to different teams.
In the past, this process was done manually within an Excel spreadsheet. For being a tech-oriented organization, it was a clumsy and unrefined method of doing this process. The scheduling was clunky, the spreadsheet was hard to navigate, and the information always ended up confusing hackers more than helping. It became our goal to design an elegant application that would handle everything— from scheduling to judging assignments to selecting winners— we wanted to accomplish it in a way that lived up to our standards. However, this idea came relatively late into the semester— specifically, we only had a week until the hackathon to have a working product. With my unique understanding of the technologies involved with creating this new expo application, I took responsibility for delivering it before judgement day. With a team of dedicated and skilled individuals by my side, we embarked on an exhilarating race against the clock. The challenge only fueled our determination to create something remarkable.
With my unique understanding of the frameworks, the coding environment became my playground. The team looked up at me to lead, and the elements of the application were under my creative command. I organized the tasks, leveraging everyone’s strengths and expertise. Late nights turned into early mornings as we poured our hearts and souls into the development process. As the days flew by, we encountered numerous obstacles and hurdles. For the first rendition of a complicated idea, there were millions of details to hash out. So many to the point where not even the directors or the presidents were sure of every detail. But the time pressure forced our hand, and we had to leverage our problem-solving skills and decide on an executive decision. With each obstacle overcome, we grew stronger as a team, bonded by our desire to provide the best experience possible for our hackers. Ultimately, we were able to crank our a working model by the time the hackathon was over. Even though the platform didn’t work perfectly, most of the participants were unaware of the panic-driven fixes being deployed in the backroom. For a one-week long and first-time effort at creating something brand new, I would consider it a success.
Main Website
Tell me this isn’t a hot design:
Tech Team Photos
