HACK 24: 2018 LIVE BLOG

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Hack 24 time is upon us! This is my 4th Hack 24 and I’ll be live-blogging the experience of the weekend.

Friday: Hack 24 Eve

Friday 10:45pm

Sat with my best friend working on levelling up D&D characters. NERDS UNITE.

I’m like a kid at Christmas right now, HACK24 HYPE INTENSIFIES.

Saturday: Hack 24 Day 1

Saturday 6:00am

Alarm: BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Me: SMASH

Right, there are very few reasons to be awake this early on a Saturday.

Saturday 7:30am

Met Hodgy at the station, sat for a little gathering our thoughts before catching the train at 8am.

Saturday 8:40am

We’re here! The banners looking AMAZING as always!

Saturday 9:00am

Battlestation: ready!

Saturday 10:00am

HACKBOT IS ADORABLE!

Look at that friendly face! 💖

Saturday 10:15am

People! There’s an awesome buzz in the room now, and with Overwerk playing - there’s a really good vibe in here.

Saturday 10:25am

Once again we’ll be using the git yolo alias to write our commits for the weekend!

https://github.com/Brunty/dotfiles/blob/master/git/.gitconfig#L22

In your ~/.gitconfig

[alias]
    yolo = !git commit -S -m \"$(curl -s whatthecommit.com/index.txt)\"

Saturday 11:00am

Opening presentation time! T-1HOUR

Saturday 12:00pm

AIRHORN!

Let’s do this…

Saturday 12:15pm

Team sticker acquired!

Our team:

[Redacted]

■■■■■ in the ■■■■■ with the ■■■■■■■■■■■

Saturday 1:10pm

I might have to switch to wired on my headphones - the bluetooth is struggling a bit in this room. Every so often I get periods of really bad stuttering :(

Saturday 1:30pm

I was working on some design stuff, but I really don’t like it (though have ended up doing it for most of the previous years) - so I’m going to spin up a quick app to handle incoming requests from a webhook on an API we want to integrate with.

Saturday 2:45pm

GOOD DECISIONS WERE MADE

Saturday 4:10pm

I just learned that ngrok has a “Replay” button for requests in the web UI / dashboard thingy for it.

LIFE IS DIFFERENT NOW

Saturday 4:15pm

Celebrating my ngrok discovery with a delicious hot chocolate!

Saturday 6:05pm

Watched a great talk from Sam from Starling on their deployments, some really neat ideas and approaches!

I’m now listening to Soil at a very loud volume to GET THINGS GOING. (These headphones are amazing)

Time to finish writing this webhook endpoint and get it doing some magical things.

I started writing code with proper value objects, and then was like “oh fuck, yeah this is a hackathon - SCREW IT” and now it’s just throw whatever I want wherever I want to get things working*

*for your own definition of ‘working’ - I don’t have tests so who even knows! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Saturday 6:45pm

IT WORKS!

I know this because I ran tests!**

**the tests were me checking that things were created in my local DB manually after the webhook was hit, are you happy now, James?!

Saturday 8:00pm

Dinner was delicious!

Saturday 8:30pm

Finally noticed my name on the sponsor banner! Happy to support such a cool event 💖🍉

Saturday 8:45pm

Back at it! Beer at the ready!

Time to get stuff sending back to Starling via their API.

Their developers have helped us and given us some really useful information with the things we’re working on, they’re lovely people!

Saturday 10:15pm

Deal or no deal got weird…

Saturday 11:15pm

Right, back to it - I’ve found a bug in the Starling bank API that’s apparently been fixed, but the dev isn’t sure when the build will go out so for now I’m working around it!

Sunday: Hack 24 Day 2

Sunday 00:00am

Midnight!

We’ve been hacking away for 12 hours and it feels like we’ve got something that’s going to work, and is a neat idea, happyface :)

Sunday 00:55am

Stepping away from code for a little bit to work on some graphics or our submission video - thinking about it way earlier this year!

Sunday 04:45am

Just woke up from a sleep.

I think I went to sleep at about 1:45am or so - I was feeling really rough and it seems a few hours sleep has helped a little bit.

Sunday 1:55pm

Hi live blog, it’s been a while.

I’ve been busy!

Our video’s done and submitted, we’re really pleased with both the hack, and the video - yay!

This morning was frantic, I focused on the video at first, then did some UI stuff, fixed some back-end issues, then in the last 10 minutes before the time was up ended up writing JavaScript for the savings account / charity split page.

and breathe…