#wafflehacks2023

[snaildotexe]

my WaffleHacks 2023 submission

This was my first hackathon! A bit late in the game as a 4th year, I was always too intimidated by the idea of trying to write an entire project in a day and then have it judged and compared to other projects that are probably leagues better than mine. But a waffle themed hackathon was much less intimidating.

My project is Packmate. It's supposed to help you decide how many of X item to bring, somewhat inspired by those posts/memes that are like "I'm bringing 12 pairs of underwear on my 2 day weekend trip, y'know, in case i shit myself 10 times"

As you can probably tell, it's not finished😭 I actually decided to join this hackathon super last minute, and still I didn't even start until yesterday afternoon (submission was today at noon), so I didn't work on it for as long as I would've liked to.

I am a bit upset that I didn't get to implement my full concept for the project (I actually wanted to use an Accuweather API to have it check the weather and select different types of clothes you need during your trip but that was not happening in this timeframe lol), but in the end I'm happy for the experience.

Rather than aiming for any prizes or ranking, I ended up just using this project to focus on practicing html/css design, which is what I want to improve in. This was also really good practice in project timeline estimation, feature prioritization etc. I was able to whittle down my feature wishlist and focus on what I know was realistic for me in my timeline.

I was honestly unsure if I would even have *enough* project to be worth submitting. There were so many points yesterday where I was like "This is hard. This isn't school, I could quit right now with zero repercussions" lol. But in the end, I'm proud (and ngl a little surprised at myself) to have submitted anything at all, let alone a somewhat finished demo of something I had only conceptualized hours before.

So thanks Wafflehacks for being waffle themed. This is hopefully my first of many!