Published on

I Won My First Hackathon!

Authors

MHacks24

Sections

Travel log

Traveling

Campus

The trip started with taking the Amtrak train leaving UIUC at 05:00. We (Hackathon friends and I) got to Chicago and spent time walking around, eating food, and finding places to do some homework. At around 19:00, we took our second train to Michigan and rested for a bit of the train ride. Finally, we each found a place for the night.

The UMich campus has a really large center campus and a really large north engineering campus. For some reason, they're really far apart so we had to take a bus back and forth for certain events of the hackathon.

Food

There were a couple incidents with the food I had on campus. Namely, we had takeout and requested no peanuts or nuts because of my allergies. We then proceeded to receive takeout with peanuts... =T. Bummer... However, aside from that experience, the Hackathon organizers had provided food accomodations for everyone. At the end of the trip, right before we left Michigan, we got food at a diner. It's called Northside Grill. Definitely a recommendation if you go.

Transport

The busses came around regularly, felt like the average bus ride. However, the Amtrak at the end of the trip, which was supposed to take us back to Chicago just stopped functioning. The trip from Chicago to Michigan was delayed by 3 hours, and the trip back from Michigan to Chicago just stopped functioning. Oh well, we ended up taking a really cramped bus.

The Hackathon

Opening Ceremony

Opening ceremony was pretty cool. I didn't attend much of it, but what I do know is that they sync up the lighting of these wristbands they gave us for admissions. [Insert Image of Wristbands Here].

The Idea

Our team came up with multiple ideas. However, the idea we stuck with was an AI profiler and optimizer made with a new structured language called BAML. We wanted to implement many features, namely:

  1. Auto documentation
  2. Profiler to assess coding
  3. Memory checker
  4. Optimizer with reasoning
  5. Dependency graph

By the end of the hackathon, we were able to get a decent bit of that list with either complete functionality or demo-level functionality.

Coding

To be written

Closing Ceremony

To be written