VenusHacks2021: University of California,Irvine
This past weekend I attended VenusHacks, a women-centric hackathon organized by the University of California, Irvine with 500+ attendees from across the world. It was held virtually this year because of the pandemic. Our team created a progressive web app ‘relax.com’ where we efficiently try to make positive reinforcement for everyone working from home during the pandemic. Here’s our story-
Background:
I was randomly reading messages on Discord and came across the VenusHacks application link on the DesignBuddies server. It really interested me as it was UCI’s (University of California, Irvine) first women-centric hackathon. I straight away applied to it hoping that I would be shortlisted amongst all the applicants all over the world. And, woohoo on 5th April I received a mail for the same. I was really excited to be a part of it as it was my first international hackathon.
Virtual Hackathon:
The hackathon was conducted online on April 24–25,2021. All the details and schedules were very well put up on their website. We received information about Slack invites, Devpost signup, etc two days prior to the hackathon.
22 April 2021
I joined the Slack channel two days prior to the event and started interacting with the attendees to form a team and get all the updates.
23–24 April 2021
Team Formation:
VenusHacks had a team formation having breakout rooms to form teams having similar interests.
I was already actively reaching out to people with similar interests to form a team beforehand.
One of my teammates reached out to me and I instantly said yes! It was a wonderful experience working with my team. Our team members worked from different time zones (one from PST, one from EST, two from IST). Through it all, we maintained an efficient work schedule by creating a tag-team dynamic.
Opening Ceremony:
The opening ceremony covered everything about the weekend, including all the fun workshops, socials, prizes, swag, and more! We also had our keynote speaker Lisa Conn, the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Icebreaker talk about her career journey and experiences. This talk was really great and inspiring. Next up, Anuhya from MLH (Major League Hacking) which is a global hacker community explained the hackathon workflow.
Hacking begins
Brainstorming:
We created a Miro board which is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together, from brainstorming with digital sticky notes to planning and managing agile workflows. Once hacking officially began, we began fleshing out our ideas and prototyping.
Implementing:
We created a Discord server for collaboration. It really helped us create a workflow catering to the time constraints. It was quite helpful to us due to its amazing features all in one place. We also created our team's GitHub repository. Collaborated on Figma for designing the interfaces. Understood about developer handoff. Working on our pitch video and the documentation for the submission on Devpost.
Roadblocks and learnings:
One of the major roadblocks we faced was the time difference of all our teammates. Also, the majority of us were first-timers so it was quite intimidating. In spite of all the challenges, we came out strong and submitted our project just in time.
VenusHacks was a great experience! It was really fun working with my teammates from over the globe and learning from each other. Thanks to the team for organizing the hackathon. They did a great job.
Links to our project:
Devpost:
PWA:
Thank you for reading all along through my article. This is my first Medium article. Hope you like it.
