Local Hack Day 2017

Last week, I attended HackSheffield’s Local Hack Day, which isn’t the usual weekend-long hackathons but only last a day. I’ve talked about hackathons in the past year (do you remember I wrote it as a thing I want to be held accountable for in 2017? #ididthat 😆) like here and here.

I have to admit that initially I didn’t really understand the hype but after attending a few and connecting with the rest of the community through various events, I now know why!

In addition to hacking together with my dream team (the #shefcodefirst team i.e. the group of us who are involved in the best community ever – Code First: Girls), I also had a go at vlogging my hackathon experience and tried my best to capture the hype. ✨

Working with The University of Sheffield, I put together this short video on my hackathon experience and why you should try out a hackathon. Check it out:

The process

It was a lot of fun to film and edit! Recently, I’ve been working a lot on videos – ranging from projects like this to a component of my dissertation – and have learnt a lot of neat editing tricks and starting to develop an eye for video editing (I have to say my photo editing is 👌🏻😉)

I didn’t feel awkward interviewing people and found it fun to hear the vast number of experiences. Looking back though, I wish I had a microphone because editing the audio was difficult.

The hackathon

We weren’t really struggling for ideas because Christmas is an inspiration itself, right? 😂 As I showed in the video, my team ended up building a “gifs by GIPHY” advent calendar!

A few hours into the hackathon, we went to a workshop run by Matt who went over using GraphQL which was very informative – we ended up implementing it into the team page of our hack. So, whenever someone in the team edits their bio or profile photo on GitHub, the page automatically updates it with the new changes which is pretty neat!

During the workshop, another hacker saw that I was struggling with understanding CSS Grid (which I wanted to use for the hack) He went out of his way to show me a simple use of CSS Grid on one of his university projects which I appreciated because everything I was reading suddenly clicked in place.

I remembered why I love attending hackathons. 👩🏻‍💻

I’ve been trying to understand CSS Grid for weeks now but I couldn’t get my head around it. Another hacker, Iulian (hey 👋🏼), just taught me how to use it. I’m so impressed 🤩 FUTURE OF WEB DEV #LocalHackDay @HackSheffield

— Pauline P. Narvas 🎄🤶🏼🎁 (@paulienuh) December 2, 2017

Sometimes we need others explaining things to us instead of just reading it off a screen! I ended up building the whole front-end of the calendar using CSS grid sprinkled with snowflakes made by CSS. ❄

Demoing our https://t.co/HVjM9nIu1d – an advent calendar that shows you the top 25 Christmas @GIPHY gifs 🎄

Awesome team work #shefcodefirst! Thanks for making #LocalHackDay a blast @HackSheffield 🙌🏼@s_kariotis @katkoler @MrDarrenV @_fallingstars_ @CodeFirstGirls pic.twitter.com/Niw0tY9elc

— Pauline P. Narvas 🎄🤶🏼🎁 (@paulienuh) December 2, 2017

Demoing felt super rewarding – I enjoyed showing off our little baby 🤩

Overall, the team smashed it in just 10 hours with most of them being beginners/their first hackathon. It’s always so great to see students of the Code First: Girls course come along to these hackathons, they weren’t confident in their coding skills 8 weeks before and now they’re coding things in under 10 hours. I’m always so proud!

Thanks for a great event HackSheffield! And thank you to Matt for introducing me to this world of hackathons and the rest of the community for welcoming me in 🤗