Baby’s First Hackathon

Several weeks back, I began working with my bosses to plan our company’s second annual hackathon. I had no idea what to expect. The three of us would be judges (since I have no coding talent to speak of) and our director of marketing with help out the two teams with marketing and branding, etc. Thursday, June 30th, was the day and we arrived before 10am, gave out t-shirts (which all said #TeamDavid because both captains were named David), and assigned teams. The only rule was to create something using our API. 

We used CaterCow to cater lunch (Cuban), dinner (Mediterranean), and breakfast (basic breakfast noms), and we ordered from Insomnia Cookies for a midnight snack of cookies and ice cream, like all champions do. The Insomnia Cookies order was almost an hour late and they seemed pretty incompetent, but everything from CaterCow was delicious and right on time.

Around 7pm. we had a chair masseuse come in for a few hours, and in the wee hours of the morning, I started beating people on our huge Connect 4 board. The director of marketing and myself snuck out at 8pm for an Urban Zen class at Yoga Shanti, too, which was the best. We played cards. We took walks around the Flatiron at 2am. We did whatever was necessary to stay awake.

The office was divided into two war zones – Team Conference Room and Team White Board. A bunch of people (myself included) lasted until almost 5am and then we took catnaps. One of the team captains blew his air mattress up and took a quick cat nap around 6am. 

The projects were presented at 7ish, my co-judges and I deliberated, and we awarded a 5 day weekend to the team we thought was the best (ie Tuesday off). I headed to the 1 train with our intern (who actually is more like a genius because she has a PhD) because we were both headed to the UWS so we were going to make sure we didn’t fall asleep.

I came home to Playbill and J, who’d spent the night with her so she wouldn’t be alone, and then promptly passed out until 1:30pm. A good time was had by all. Until next year… 

Photo is the Flatiron Building at 6am.

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