How I got rejected from a hackathon and won it 48h later
Someone sent me a link about a hackathon that was going to happen in Barcelona soon. As a good hacker, I took a look at it and to my surprise I saw that it was organized by Kiwi (a company I know and admire for using their website almost every time I plan a trip) and I was also passionate about the challenge: to improve the travel industry by creating a tool using their API. It was perfect. I come from the world of travel, I like programming and I like the challenges could not be more aligned with the event. I had been thinking about an idea for a long time and this event was perfect to carry it out. It was a tool for those couples who live at a distance. The idea was that users enter two origins and the system looked for the cheapest destination to be based on the price of flights. Besides, luckily for me, Kiwi has an API that allows you to tell it an origin and shows you (sorted by price) the flights to any part of the world. So you just had to match the list of flights between two origins and ready. So I needed some frontend or backend to help me do it in 24 hours, so I started asking my friends if they would join. After a few days we already had equipment. Marc, a front-end Vue specialist from Verse, Fernando, UX/UI master who works with me and me. We were very excited a few days before to talk about what features I could have, in which frameworks we felt more comfortable and as we were going to explain.
Just some days before the event I receive an email saying something like: “We are sorry to inform you that you were not selected to participate in this first edition”
Our faces were like:
Why? We are the perfect developers for this hackathon! Would it be for lack of places? Is it because I don’t have any code uploaded to my GitHub account? I was really disappointed and before surrendering I tweet this:
Almost unexpectedly, I received a reply from Kiwi in the form of an email in my inbox: “We would love for you to join. Please provide more info.”
Indeed, when I submitted the request via the web, I hardly sent any information about who we were and what we had done in the software world, so we explained where we worked, who we were, sent our LinkedIn profiles and picked up a team name: Hacking Airlines.
Ready to hack!
The day of the event arrived. We were very nervous. Especially Fer, who was his first hackathon. The place was fantastic (Aticco Barcelona): there was a lot of food and drink, rooms with monitors and even they bought inflatable mattresses. After dinner and after the 11 teams presented their idea, it was time to get to work. It seemed like there was a lot of level. Even 2 teams had the same idea as us! So we could only beat them if we ran it better than them. Pressure from minute 1.
After designing the main features and drawing how the UX would be we started developing. I decided to do the backend in Flask because it had been a while since I coded Python while Marc did the frontend in Vue.
From Kiwi we were told that they had some components ready to work with so that would speed up the development. Even they were made in React (being a NPM package) we thought it would not be difficult to put them in Vue, so we tried. The hours passed and when we finally make the components work in Vue, we see that it is impossible to pass properties and make them work. Holy molly.
What should we do?
It was 5 o’clock in the morning and we had been invested many hours to get back. If we continued with Vue we had to do it without the help of the Kiwi components. It was a tough decision. We risked it? Neither Marc nor I had any idea about React. In the end we thought we’d come here to learn and have fun, so we did a git reset –hard, had a few shots of tequila and started all over again.
At this point we were happy to do 1 or 2 screens and show, even if it was mock, the idea we had. A few hours later I had the backend ready and our mentor Jan helped Marc connect to it. We even had a chance to make a working demo!
It was almost time to finish and, after eating a great paella on the terrace, we started to prepare the presentation. Those were the most stressful moments of the whole weekend. While Marc was making the search button work, I was buying the domain, uploading the web to the server and making it work (thank you Docker).
It’s time
Each of the teams presented their project and what they had achieved. It was amazing to see what people are able to do in 24 hours. I remember that a group presented a platform to find other travelers who had a stopover at your same airport. At that moment I told my colleagues: this project is going to win. I remember telling him the same thing in the following: a gamification app for when you get bored at the airport.
All the projects were incredible and we presented ours the penultimate ones.
All of us were very tired, as we had more than 24 without sleep (some of us got 1 hour or 2 on the mattresses) so I tried to make the presentation more fun and decided to explain our story of how we went from 0 to hero in React that night.
We went from absolute tension to absolute relax. We went upstairs to the terrace with a few beers, background music and discussed with the other groups how it had gone, how they were and how they had seen the event. 15 minutes later the jury went up to give the results.
And the winner is…
They started giving the prize to the best design, third place, second place and finally to the winners. It was Juraj Hrinik, Kiwi’s product owner, who announced it saying something like:
“For having learned a language in less than 24 hours and having built something fantastic with it, the winners are Hacking Airlines”. We couldn’t believe it:
We went up to collect the prize (1000€ in kiwi vouchers) and thanked everyone for making it possible. Then, still in shock, we stayed a while longer talking with the Kiwi team and the rest of the participants. We even improvised a karaoke while they were serving Margaritas!
What I learned
The fact is, even though we were rejected in the beginning, we ended up winning. This is an example of the things that happen to you (and will happen) in real life. You may not get selected in a job or fail your driving test or there may be people who tell you not to do what you’re thinking, but the important thing is not to stop fighting. When you really have a goal and a lot of desire, you are unstoppable.
On the other hand, and as the Stackoverflow surveys says, hackathons serve to learn and build community. In our case, we met many people, many cracks eager to learn and face new challenges and many stories of people I admire since then (such as a group of UX students who had never programmed and who ended up in second place or an architect who left everything at the third of career to start learning programming) and all of us in greater or lesser degree ended up learning something new and leaving our comfort zone. In all cases they are people who discover a passion and pursue it no matter what.
It was such a great experience, after all, and we are very proud to say we will finish our project in the next weeks with all the main features finished 🙂 If you are interested, take a look at http://meetatworld.com
Keep hacking!