Night Hack II
My buddy Olivier and I participated in Night Hack II, my first hackathon outside of the corporate bubble, and first time at Founders, Inc., an amazing, inviting startup studio reminiscent of a sophisticated hacker space or a renegade FAANG office building.
We were given $200 in Cursor credits per participant, or 10 months of Pro. After trying Cursor w/ their free credits, I don’t think I’m ever going back to VSCode, which I already don’t use much (I’m a Warp/Nvim guy)
Our process started off pretty messy. We underestimated the github configuration process for teams - none of us had much experience setting one up for a group- and paid for it in time. We committed changes directly to main/master with only verbal agreements not to touch each other’s files, no time for PRs on this train. We hard-coded the LLM API key and pushed it to github (don’t make that face, it’s a hackathon). At some point, one of our Cursor agents hooked up the API key to the chatbot, which we were surprised suddenly started working (no one built this out explicitly).
We didn’t place, but based on laughs we had the most fun, and we actually finished something in 4 hours: https://nannyclaw-production.up.railway.app/, though we lost hard to lots of impressive entries:
- Parallax backgrounds/wallpaper for AR/XR headsets
- Claude Code voice activated in AR/XR
- An LLM trained on MMRI scans that watches advertisements and determines which parts of the brain are activated at which point in the ad.
- An app that helps autonomous vehicles drive better through scanning open source waymo data about near-misses
It was an honor to be obliterated by these rising stars.
Other random thoughts
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People introduced themselves to me with “What are you building” like 4 times. Names are exchanged only after 5 minutes of talking about our projects.
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Some people drop everything to try and “make it” in San Francisco. Makes me realize how lucky I am to live here.
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The real hackathon is the friends you make along the way.
