It’s been a while since I last wrote - I was on a bus headed home from work in Seattle two and a half months ago. It’s now Fall term of my final year. I graduate at the end of Winter term, in March of 2016. Time has an incredible way of sneaking up on you. I’m filled with simultanous joy and sadness that this is my final song here at the University of Oregon, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a timeless classic.
Since my last entry, I joined up with the Cheerleading team, had a month’s worth of two or three-a-days, restructured the Web Dev Club into a more generic Dev Club, moved in with an enabler of a roommate, threw the UO’s first ever hackathon, and quit the Cheerleading team. There’s plenty to say about a lot of these, but I want to focus on my enabler of a roommate and that hackathon.
You see, my roommate John is a half-breed between the Business school and CS school, a member of the Dev Club, and the VP of the Business school’s Entrepreneurship Club. He approached me around the end of Week 1 of school and asked, “Hey, do you want to plan a hackathon?” I knew there was enough demand, and someone had to do it. I was in. When met with Entrepreneurship club advisor Kate Harmon, we came to a sudden realization: the only date that would work was 19 days away. It was all in right there, or no dice. We had to go for it.
For the next 19 days, we were working tooth and nail. We had to get sponsorships, plan for food, get swag, promote the event, and most important of all, get the CS faculty on board. I had to draft a formal proposal and John had to send all sorts of emails to his contacts in the industry. In the end, we got the OK to do it with 12 days remaining.
We met Krell, an awesome guy with all the experience in the world, at the Indie Game Con and asked him to help us. He ended up being a vital important piece of our puzzle; he was able to cover the gaps that John and I couldn’t quite reach. His logo design, pitching, and huge local network drove more interest than we could handle.
Thanks to numerous sponsors, we managed to get enough funds for T-shirts, stickers, and great food to last us 24 hours. We sold out the event to 41 students, and lots of solid projects came out the other side. In our haste, we didn’t do a great job of documenting all the projects, but we blew the faculty and local tech industry away with the quality of both the projects made and the event itself.
Today we’re taking some time to look at what went wrong, what we could have done better, and creating a document for next year’s hackathon team to follow. But right now, all I care about is that we did it. Momentum now exists at the University of Oregon to create a hacker culture, to create a culture of excellence and craftiness among the student body, and to continue on this spur-of-the-moment hackathon for years to come.
I’m excited to see what life throws at me next.