HogHacks Hackathon 2024 Reflection
Published at May 16, 2024
Table of Contents
Expectations
Going into this hackathon, I really did not know what to expect. I just wanted to build something, anything. I often struggle to come up with ideas on my own, so this was a great excuse to create something under a time constraint. I didn’t know what tools I’d use or what the topic would be, but I expected to complete a functional and somewhat polished project. About a week before the event, I had no partners lined up and anticipated being matched the day of. I ended up finding out that one of my classmates was participating with some friends and they needed a teammate. It turned out they had little programming experience, which excited me because I love teaching and learn best when I teach.
Theme Reveal
The theme was revealed to be fitness and sports. Ideas like fitness games and trackers immediately came to mind. My team eventually decided on creating a sports analytics web app that would fetch data from a third-party database through an API and display it to the user. This was partially inspired by my teammates’ sports betting experience and the idea that such a tool would be cool. Although I don’t partake in sports betting, I thought the project would be a good learning opportunity and not overly simple. We named it Jolt, playing on the idea of getting information quickly.
The Stack
I had no strong preference for the tech stack as I wanted to learn something new. I had been using React.js to build the RIOT Robotics website, so I leaned towards Next.js, which is frequently used for other projects and similar to what I knew but with some new features. We built the entire project with Next.js 14 and Tailwind CSS.
The product
After 24 hours, we had a usable application that fetched various NFL data. I was pleased with our code implementation and learned best practices for fetching data in Next.js from an API. If I were to continue this project, I’d add more sports and the ability to view previous seasons, as the application currently defaults to the most recent season.
Did we win anything?
No, we didn’t win anything, but that wasn’t my primary goal. Winning was in the back of my mind, but I was more excited to participate in a hackathon and create something functional. I learned how to use Next.js, taught skills to my inexperienced teammates, and built a fully functional app, all in 24 hours. I count that as a win.
Feel free to check out the live project here.
Also feel free to take a look at the code here
Image from socialify