Victory comes at a Price

I guess you could say that last Sunday I had a sort of Pyrrhic victory: There was a hackathon that was going on that weekend, so I spent most of my Saturday learning how to code an Android app in Java and by the time Sunday came around, I had been working for nearly 16 hours on coding that app. Of course, I didn't expect to win and, in fact, I was hoping to lose because that would mean that I wouldn't have to code anymore. After spending so long with that program, I just couldn't stand the sight of it anymore. Fortunately... and yet unfortunately... we did actually manage to win the first tier of the hackathon, getting in the top 5 of the 13 teams competing at USC. As a reward, we were given $100 as a team for all working on the program all weekend, but we were told to continue developing the app for a final presentation on the following Thursday, which just passed by a few days ago.

I can't believe that the most I've stayed awake for this program, though. I was initially going to just help out a little bit while we got an actual person who knew how to code in Android/Java to do the work, but since we were not able to find people who could actually code, another freshman studying Computer Science with an emphasis on games and I had to do all of it instead. We were working with 2 sophomores and a junior, only one of whom was a computer science major and the junior was planning to minor in it. I think we had the least coding experience out of anyone in the top 5, which was impressive, but also very discouraging because we knew there was no way that we would be able to come up with, and execute the coding for, a better app than any other team. Anyway, I spent my Monday and my Wednesday, starting at midnight so I guess it would actually be Tuesday and Thursday, coding each screen for the application and trying to make sure that there would actually be a good-looking app to show off to the judges on Thursday evening. I was up until 4 on Tuesday and 6 on Thursday, so I was hoping that all the work would pay off. Of course, though, it did not and we did not receive any reward on Thursday because one of the other teams managed to develop a better app than we did. Speaking of which, our app was supposed to be a polling app for all the students at USC, where you would download it and answer a few questions and eventually be able to level up and gain points, which could be redeemed for prizes. It seems like a ridiculous concept because people would likely not want to fill out the poll, but it was one of the suggestions made by the people who hosted the event for an app.

I have to say, as much as I was hoping to learn to program before this event, I don't think this was the kind of learning experience I was hoping for... This is just too much in one sitting and although I learned the material, for the most part, I don't like the stress that was associated with the 2 day time limit. Coding in java, at least as far as I can remember, was not as challenging as this event when I was helping to develop that social media application with Dylan, but I guess that failed... Perhaps this is the best and worst way for me to learn a programming language.

-Sam Rho