Tim Draper's Hero City Hackathon

Today was my first hackathon in attendance and it was a small one located in San Mateo.

There was three categories to hack for: best health idea, best small business idea, best bitcoin idea.

Alright, I get there, get my swag, and finally find my teammate Louis. He was already there and talking to a bunch of other people. He was a nerd lol, but with that came his knowledge in math and physics. We all chatted about out backgrounds, and what schools we went to.

Eventually things came time for crack-a-lackin, and I found myself in a team of three with Louis and a bitcoin eccentric guy named Elliot. He was pretty much your average, thin guy with subtle hipsterdom.

Intro to the hackathon.

It took about TWO HOURS to decide on an idea, but we decided to go with a silly bitcoin idea to make it rain with the action of swiping bills off your phone and people nearby will get the coins. I laughed initially, but absolutely loved it.

The Main Screen. Just to sweeten the deal, it would make a Lil John "Yea" whenever a coin was flicked.
And receiving phones will hear a coin drop sound.

Some challenges that I faced were implementing actual transactions of bitcoins. In the end we never got it to work so we just used a mock for the bitcoin transactions. Another is the sync adapter being set at a very high rate of syncing to try to read whether someone just rained on you or not. It was ok for a demo, but my phone turned super hot.

In the end even though my teammates tried to help, I coded EVERYTHING. From Android to server and in between. I felt a bit frustrated at that but people shone through in their own ways. For example Elliott was the one who came up with the idea and was a bitcoin subject matter expert. The other Louis tried to help with backend and the bitcoin transaction but came up short with his limited experience. He did however give an extremely entertaining presentation- something in which I never saw coming from him and would accredit it as the main reason in why we won our category. He conveyed the idea that this app is easy, fun and can really promote the use of bitcoins in a very eccentric tone of voice and body language.

Btw, we ended up winning our category.

Elliott left early for work, but I became good friends with Utsab (a jounalist) and Louis.

The prizes were toys and 2 months of office space at this place. I donated my toy to the Boys and Girls Club that also attended the event and were big fans of our app. I would've never played with it if I kept it. The main coordinator saw my deed and even gave me a bro hug lol.

Later that night I shared a cup of sanity with my homies, Alex and G.