My first hackathon nearly ended before it began, because of a form I forgot to sign.
HackRice was 36 hours at Rice University. I went in without a team, almost didn't get in, lost a car to a tow truck at 3 AM, and still left with a working product. This is the longer version of how that happened.
The form I forgot
Before the event, there was a final confirmation form to sign. I forgot. When I showed up, that meant waiting almost two hours just for a chance to be let in.
It worked out, and I got in. But it's a good reminder of how small things can undo big plans. The lesson wasn't complicated: always double-check the small things.
Showing up alone
I also came without a team. Many people at a hackathon arrive with a team, and I had none.
Luckily, I ran into a family friend and joined their group. That put me in an unusual spot. I was the freshman on a team of juniors. They had more hackathon experience than I did.
It gave me a chance to learn from people with more experience, while still taking ownership of a major part of the project.
What we built
We built GetMeHired, an AI-powered interview platform.
Interview practice is usually lonely and hard to measure. You rehearse answers in your head, or with a friend who can only tell you how it felt. It's difficult to see yourself the way an interviewer does.
GetMeHired is meant to close that gap. A candidate practices a realistic interview on webcam. Afterward, the platform gives an AI-generated score and detailed feedback. It also gives timestamped moments, which point to specific places in the interview where the candidate did well and where they could improve.
The timestamps matter more than the score. A number tells you how you did, but a moment in the recording tells you what to change. You can go straight to the part where an answer wandered and watch it back.
We also explored the employer side. There, recorded interviews can be uploaded for AI-assisted candidate analysis, which turns the same idea around: helping the person doing the evaluating, not only the person being evaluated.
My part
My work covered the frontend, the UI and UX, the individual candidate dashboard, the branding, and the business side of the project.
The candidate dashboard is where an individual candidate sees their results. I also worked on the branding and on the business side, the part of the project about what GetMeHired is as a product and how it explains its value.
I spent a lot of the weekend thinking about how the product should work, and also about how it should look, feel and communicate that value.
What it was built with
Next.js, Rust, AWS, Cloudflare R2, Backboard, SmartSpectra, Solana and Vultr, plus a handful of other SDKs and APIs.
That's a lot of tools for 36 hours.
The 3 AM tow
Sometime around 3 AM, our car got towed.
It was definitely not part of the 36-hour development plan. We kept building anyway.
What I took from it
- Adapting when plans fall apart. Between the form, the missing team and the tow truck, not much went to plan.
- Collaborating with a new team. I joined a group I hadn't planned on joining.
- Learning from more experienced developers. Being the freshman on a team of juniors helped with that.
- Making quick product decisions.
- Executing under a hard deadline.
Looking back
I came in alone, almost didn't get in, and had our car towed. I also left having helped turn an idea into a working product in 36 hours.
I'd call that a good first hackathon.
GetMeHired is at getmehired.today. The project is on Devpost and on GitHub.