I attended the Dare Mighty Things Hackathon and conference on the weekend of October 26th. Prior to attending, I had never participated in a formal hackathon before, and so I went in without any real expectations or preparation. The hackathon itself only lasted 24 hours in total, unlike others that typically can extend over the course of two days. I went by myself and planned on joining an existing team or banding one together once I got there, but I wasn’t too worried about this; my main concern was whether I could provide support and insight to my eventual team. I have programming experience in python and a bit of frontend design knowledge using HTML and javascript, but it had been quite awhile since I had needed to rely on the latter skill. Once the hackathon began, I soon learned that my particular programming skill set would not be of any obvious use, rather, I ended up providing more of a leadership role to my team as well as advisory to design and implementation for our hack. This allowed me to really take on a passenger-side style perspective and learn something new and unique from each of my teammates: I was able to observe my teammates train our machine learning algorithm, as well as work alongside others on how to design a proper user interface. Above all, I gained a newfound understanding and respect for one of the foundations of computer science: peer programming and teamwork.
I went to the Dare Mighty Things hackathon at the McDonald’s main office from October 26th to 27th. I had no experience and never attended a hackathon before, so I felt nervous and also a little bit excited. So, to be prepared, I did some research for myself, and I found two helpful tips. The first one was to get familiarize with GitHub, which was very handy along the way. The second one was to understand teamwork, which was the priority during a hackathon because different people have a different opinion, and must collaborate to build something in a short amount of time. This hackathon was only for twenty-four hours so we stayed all night to work on our project.
My team did not have an idea of what to build in the first place, so we ended up doing one of the challenges that were given from sponsors and it worked out great. The main task was to build a voice recognition app or website for Ulta using one of the Google Cloud APIs. We used a Dialog Flow to build a chatbot on the website and our main challenge was to connect the database to the chatbot for accessing information.
This hackathon helped me to imagine a Big Picture because, before I used to code but I really did not know how to get to the end product. So this was helpful and also I understood that teamwork is really important.
I would definitely attend other hackathons, because it was a great experience.
Going to the Dare Mighty Things Hackathon and conference was a surreal experience. I had previously gone to a hackathon before but this time was different as my team actually ended up winning not only one of the challenge problems but also the overall hackathon. Since we attended the hackathon we got free tickets to the conference which I ended up attending. Going into the conference I was highly motivated and intent on getting as much out of the experience as possible.
The conference was quite inspiring as we got to hear from the founder of Siri talk about entrepreneurship which was by far my favorite speaker. He talked about how although it appeared that his startup Siri was an overnight success, he had actually been working on it for over a decade. Entrepreneurship has become sort of a buzzword recently and the way it is depicted online shows only the positive side of it. Adam explained that in reality being an entrepreneur means that you could be working tirelessly for years before your idea takes off and that is what it really means to be an entrepreneur.
Adam’s speech was the perfect follow up to the hackathon win as it motivated me to think bigger about what I had just built and the kinds of things I could build in the future. I have also began to attend more technical conferences in order to hear from speakers in fields that I am interested in as I believe this is a great way to learn about fields I am interested in.
I attended the Dare Mighty Things hackathon on 10/26-27. It was my first hackathon and I had no clue what to expect. I had no clue how competitive it was or really any details about it, except the when and where. The venue was a lot nicer than I was expecting (Hamburger University). The kickoff was a confusing time because the mic didn’t work well, and I couldn’t hear some of the challenges. After talking with my team and some of the sponsors individually I had a good idea of two of the challenges. After some discussion my team decided on the challenge from JLL, to build an AI generated real estate narrative. We started with splitting the task into distinct parts: narrative building, backend server to serve narrative to the frontend, data aggregation, and the frontend. The narrative building was the hardest portion of the project as it required finding an adequate natural language generation library and learning how to use it. We worked the full 24 hours and by the last 10 min, the website we had build was still not working. The judging was science fair style, were we gave a 3 min presentation to a group of judges. We were later chosen to represent our app in front of the entire hackathon, which was very stressful as were not expecting it. We later won the challenge and the hackathon. The entire experience was very fun and I made some could connections with people. Afterwards I immediately registered for the next nearest hackathon
On 26/10 I attended the Dare Mighty Things hackathon and it truly was a once in a lifetime experience. I came unprepared, knowing that every contestant is really competitive and strong. In the stance of a freshman in Computer Science, the main reason I came to hackathon was to learn and experience. When I arrived at the destination, the atmosphere was busy and everyone started to form teams. Some went with friends, some initiated and form teams, leaving me alone. Luckily, I got invited to a team. Everyone looked really bright and informative, but they told me that it was okay for a first-timer and I could just watch them do the challenges. As expected, the challenges were really hard like building web structures or AI-related programmings. With just a little knowledge of Java, I had no clue what to do but to observe my team do the work. We didn’t get any rewards because the program didn’t end up functioning well, but it truly was an amazing experience overall. I would gladly sign up for another hackathon but definitely with more preparation.
The Dare Mighty Things hackathon was unexpectedly one of the most fun experiences I have had in university thus far (Attended 10/26-10/27). I signed up with nearly 0 expectations, and, seeing as I was a newbie, I thought that I may not be able to contribute all that much to whichever team I joined. Luckily, I was completely wrong in this presupposed opinion, and I did my fair share of work in the 24 hours that we were given. Upon showing up at the hackathon I joined together with a few students from IIT and we began to work on the challenge hosted by JLL. Our team decided to split the project down into a few parts. One member worked on the front end aspects, while 2 other members worked on natural language generation using an API. Myself and another member worked with Google Maps API to be able to pull even more data from our given data. For instance, if we were given a property that JLL owns, we could pull nearby locations like restaurants and coffee shops, as well as the routes/mile time to these locations. We managed to pull together our web app just in time. After presenting against nearly 60 other teams, we were chosen to present as one of the top 5 projects. After the presentations, we actually won JLL’s challenge, as well as the grand prize of the entire hackathon! Our group was comprised of almost entirely all freshmen, so this was out of left field for sure. Winning the hackathon after slogging long hours was definitely one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in a while. I would not mind attending another hackathon – I just hope for another highly competent team like this time around.
I participated in the DareMightyThings hackathon on the weekend of Oct 26-27th and went to the conference on the 28th. Before the hackathon, I didn’t have that experience in working throughout the 24 hours to get a finished product for a specific problem, especially finding a team to work with to tackle the task. Throughout the event, I learned a lot about creating front end for web-based apps, working with Angular, bootstrap, HTML, and CSS were all the things I never heard of or used only a few times, yet I learned so much of them in that 24 hours and was able to present a working front end that looks nice and also works with backend by my teammates. The conference was super interesting, seeing people who have built the world around us starting somewhere just like I am right now really give me more motivation to work harder and one day maybe change the world like they have. I would totally join more tech conference like this one, and also some hackathons to learn more of programming knowledge that I haven’t and solve interesting problems that has realistic purposes and possibilities to make things better. It’s really nice to see many people from IIT win prices and API from the hackathon, knowing I’d be studying in a competitive environment and surrounded by people I can work with to grow more.
I attended the Dare Mighty Things conference on October 28th. I did not attend the hackathon because I could not take off of work, but my friend who competed in the hackathon was nice enough to let me use his pass to attend the conference. I was really excited to attend this conference because there so many interesting people talking about what they do, their experiences, how they have become so successful, etc. Everyone at the conference had really amazing stories about how they started something small and later turned into success. They talked about their achievements and how they are all working to make the world a better place with the things they are creating or involved in. One of the most interesting speakers, in my opinion, was the co-founder of Siri. He talked about how he worked on creating Siri was not a very easy thing to create and it took over a decade to fully launch. He really motivated me into really thinking outside the box because in a field that is really growing you really need to work hard to succeed to become successful. All the other speakers really emphasized how your ideas are never going to start as perfect and not everyone will really support you through your whole journey. They never really see the hard work that goes into building/creating something, so they never understand what your inner thoughts are and how you are putting ideas into real life. Not everyone will support you but that does not mean you stop. You motivate yourself and you work really hard to bring your ideas to life. This conference really helped me understand how I could use computer science to make the world a better place. I was so intrigued that I started looking at conferences coming up near me to attend.
On the weekend of October 26th – 27th, five other IIT students and I participated in the Dare Mighty Things hackathon at McDonald’s Chicago headquarters. As the time to start working on our project approached, I felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety as this was only my second hackathon. However, since I had just gone to DemonHacks the prior weekend, I had ample time to learn from my mistakes and brush myself up on any technologies or stacks I needed to know to be more successful in my next hackathon. This preparation, coupled with the diverse competencies of my teammates, proved to be helpful in the long run as we won both the Best of Show award and the JLL Natural Language Processing challenge.
Walking out of the hackathon with a brand new Raspberry Pi 4 kit and a promise to receive a Nintendo Switch felt amazing, but those weren’t the only winnings I received from the event. The experience of working in a high-synergy team with various skills to produce a functional, prize-winning application also left with me with an important memory in my CS career along with knowledge that will help me in future endeavors. For example, I learned how to create a backend using Flask in Python, and I was taught by a teammate on how to quickly construct a frontend interface using Bootstrap. I also learned about the interactions between different parts of a web application’s stack; our team was split into different tasks from the start (like frontend, backend, natural language generation, data enrichment), and when it came time to combine these components together, we went through a lot of struggles trying to get them to interface with one another.
After winning the event, I knew that this wasn’t it for me when it came to hackathons. This only meant that I needed to keep improving by attending other hackathons and connecting with more people. This is why I went to VandyHacks the next weekend, where I formed a team with students from schools across the country and had a similar experience. I’ll keep going to hackathons in the future, but at a less frequent rate than I did this semester since 3 hackathon weekends in a row left me sleep deprived for quite a long time.
I attended the Dare Mighty Things Hackathon and conference on the weekend of October 26th. Prior to attending, I had never participated in a formal hackathon before, and so I went in without any real expectations or preparation. The hackathon itself only lasted 24 hours in total, unlike others that typically can extend over the course of two days. I went by myself and planned on joining an existing team or banding one together once I got there, but I wasn’t too worried about this; my main concern was whether I could provide support and insight to my eventual team. I have programming experience in python and a bit of frontend design knowledge using HTML and javascript, but it had been quite awhile since I had needed to rely on the latter skill. Once the hackathon began, I soon learned that my particular programming skill set would not be of any obvious use, rather, I ended up providing more of a leadership role to my team as well as advisory to design and implementation for our hack. This allowed me to really take on a passenger-side style perspective and learn something new and unique from each of my teammates: I was able to observe my teammates train our machine learning algorithm, as well as work alongside others on how to design a proper user interface. Above all, I gained a newfound understanding and respect for one of the foundations of computer science: peer programming and teamwork.
I went to the Dare Mighty Things hackathon at the McDonald’s main office from October 26th to 27th. I had no experience and never attended a hackathon before, so I felt nervous and also a little bit excited. So, to be prepared, I did some research for myself, and I found two helpful tips. The first one was to get familiarize with GitHub, which was very handy along the way. The second one was to understand teamwork, which was the priority during a hackathon because different people have a different opinion, and must collaborate to build something in a short amount of time. This hackathon was only for twenty-four hours so we stayed all night to work on our project.
My team did not have an idea of what to build in the first place, so we ended up doing one of the challenges that were given from sponsors and it worked out great. The main task was to build a voice recognition app or website for Ulta using one of the Google Cloud APIs. We used a Dialog Flow to build a chatbot on the website and our main challenge was to connect the database to the chatbot for accessing information.
This hackathon helped me to imagine a Big Picture because, before I used to code but I really did not know how to get to the end product. So this was helpful and also I understood that teamwork is really important.
I would definitely attend other hackathons, because it was a great experience.
Going to the Dare Mighty Things Hackathon and conference was a surreal experience. I had previously gone to a hackathon before but this time was different as my team actually ended up winning not only one of the challenge problems but also the overall hackathon. Since we attended the hackathon we got free tickets to the conference which I ended up attending. Going into the conference I was highly motivated and intent on getting as much out of the experience as possible.
The conference was quite inspiring as we got to hear from the founder of Siri talk about entrepreneurship which was by far my favorite speaker. He talked about how although it appeared that his startup Siri was an overnight success, he had actually been working on it for over a decade. Entrepreneurship has become sort of a buzzword recently and the way it is depicted online shows only the positive side of it. Adam explained that in reality being an entrepreneur means that you could be working tirelessly for years before your idea takes off and that is what it really means to be an entrepreneur.
Adam’s speech was the perfect follow up to the hackathon win as it motivated me to think bigger about what I had just built and the kinds of things I could build in the future. I have also began to attend more technical conferences in order to hear from speakers in fields that I am interested in as I believe this is a great way to learn about fields I am interested in.
I attended the Dare Mighty Things hackathon on 10/26-27. It was my first hackathon and I had no clue what to expect. I had no clue how competitive it was or really any details about it, except the when and where. The venue was a lot nicer than I was expecting (Hamburger University). The kickoff was a confusing time because the mic didn’t work well, and I couldn’t hear some of the challenges. After talking with my team and some of the sponsors individually I had a good idea of two of the challenges. After some discussion my team decided on the challenge from JLL, to build an AI generated real estate narrative. We started with splitting the task into distinct parts: narrative building, backend server to serve narrative to the frontend, data aggregation, and the frontend. The narrative building was the hardest portion of the project as it required finding an adequate natural language generation library and learning how to use it. We worked the full 24 hours and by the last 10 min, the website we had build was still not working. The judging was science fair style, were we gave a 3 min presentation to a group of judges. We were later chosen to represent our app in front of the entire hackathon, which was very stressful as were not expecting it. We later won the challenge and the hackathon. The entire experience was very fun and I made some could connections with people. Afterwards I immediately registered for the next nearest hackathon
On 26/10 I attended the Dare Mighty Things hackathon and it truly was a once in a lifetime experience. I came unprepared, knowing that every contestant is really competitive and strong. In the stance of a freshman in Computer Science, the main reason I came to hackathon was to learn and experience. When I arrived at the destination, the atmosphere was busy and everyone started to form teams. Some went with friends, some initiated and form teams, leaving me alone. Luckily, I got invited to a team. Everyone looked really bright and informative, but they told me that it was okay for a first-timer and I could just watch them do the challenges. As expected, the challenges were really hard like building web structures or AI-related programmings. With just a little knowledge of Java, I had no clue what to do but to observe my team do the work. We didn’t get any rewards because the program didn’t end up functioning well, but it truly was an amazing experience overall. I would gladly sign up for another hackathon but definitely with more preparation.
The Dare Mighty Things hackathon was unexpectedly one of the most fun experiences I have had in university thus far (Attended 10/26-10/27). I signed up with nearly 0 expectations, and, seeing as I was a newbie, I thought that I may not be able to contribute all that much to whichever team I joined. Luckily, I was completely wrong in this presupposed opinion, and I did my fair share of work in the 24 hours that we were given. Upon showing up at the hackathon I joined together with a few students from IIT and we began to work on the challenge hosted by JLL. Our team decided to split the project down into a few parts. One member worked on the front end aspects, while 2 other members worked on natural language generation using an API. Myself and another member worked with Google Maps API to be able to pull even more data from our given data. For instance, if we were given a property that JLL owns, we could pull nearby locations like restaurants and coffee shops, as well as the routes/mile time to these locations. We managed to pull together our web app just in time. After presenting against nearly 60 other teams, we were chosen to present as one of the top 5 projects. After the presentations, we actually won JLL’s challenge, as well as the grand prize of the entire hackathon! Our group was comprised of almost entirely all freshmen, so this was out of left field for sure. Winning the hackathon after slogging long hours was definitely one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in a while. I would not mind attending another hackathon – I just hope for another highly competent team like this time around.
I participated in the DareMightyThings hackathon on the weekend of Oct 26-27th and went to the conference on the 28th. Before the hackathon, I didn’t have that experience in working throughout the 24 hours to get a finished product for a specific problem, especially finding a team to work with to tackle the task. Throughout the event, I learned a lot about creating front end for web-based apps, working with Angular, bootstrap, HTML, and CSS were all the things I never heard of or used only a few times, yet I learned so much of them in that 24 hours and was able to present a working front end that looks nice and also works with backend by my teammates. The conference was super interesting, seeing people who have built the world around us starting somewhere just like I am right now really give me more motivation to work harder and one day maybe change the world like they have. I would totally join more tech conference like this one, and also some hackathons to learn more of programming knowledge that I haven’t and solve interesting problems that has realistic purposes and possibilities to make things better. It’s really nice to see many people from IIT win prices and API from the hackathon, knowing I’d be studying in a competitive environment and surrounded by people I can work with to grow more.
I attended the Dare Mighty Things conference on October 28th. I did not attend the hackathon because I could not take off of work, but my friend who competed in the hackathon was nice enough to let me use his pass to attend the conference. I was really excited to attend this conference because there so many interesting people talking about what they do, their experiences, how they have become so successful, etc. Everyone at the conference had really amazing stories about how they started something small and later turned into success. They talked about their achievements and how they are all working to make the world a better place with the things they are creating or involved in. One of the most interesting speakers, in my opinion, was the co-founder of Siri. He talked about how he worked on creating Siri was not a very easy thing to create and it took over a decade to fully launch. He really motivated me into really thinking outside the box because in a field that is really growing you really need to work hard to succeed to become successful. All the other speakers really emphasized how your ideas are never going to start as perfect and not everyone will really support you through your whole journey. They never really see the hard work that goes into building/creating something, so they never understand what your inner thoughts are and how you are putting ideas into real life. Not everyone will support you but that does not mean you stop. You motivate yourself and you work really hard to bring your ideas to life. This conference really helped me understand how I could use computer science to make the world a better place. I was so intrigued that I started looking at conferences coming up near me to attend.
On the weekend of October 26th – 27th, five other IIT students and I participated in the Dare Mighty Things hackathon at McDonald’s Chicago headquarters. As the time to start working on our project approached, I felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety as this was only my second hackathon. However, since I had just gone to DemonHacks the prior weekend, I had ample time to learn from my mistakes and brush myself up on any technologies or stacks I needed to know to be more successful in my next hackathon. This preparation, coupled with the diverse competencies of my teammates, proved to be helpful in the long run as we won both the Best of Show award and the JLL Natural Language Processing challenge.
Walking out of the hackathon with a brand new Raspberry Pi 4 kit and a promise to receive a Nintendo Switch felt amazing, but those weren’t the only winnings I received from the event. The experience of working in a high-synergy team with various skills to produce a functional, prize-winning application also left with me with an important memory in my CS career along with knowledge that will help me in future endeavors. For example, I learned how to create a backend using Flask in Python, and I was taught by a teammate on how to quickly construct a frontend interface using Bootstrap. I also learned about the interactions between different parts of a web application’s stack; our team was split into different tasks from the start (like frontend, backend, natural language generation, data enrichment), and when it came time to combine these components together, we went through a lot of struggles trying to get them to interface with one another.
After winning the event, I knew that this wasn’t it for me when it came to hackathons. This only meant that I needed to keep improving by attending other hackathons and connecting with more people. This is why I went to VandyHacks the next weekend, where I formed a team with students from schools across the country and had a similar experience. I’ll keep going to hackathons in the future, but at a less frequent rate than I did this semester since 3 hackathon weekends in a row left me sleep deprived for quite a long time.