QWacks - A hackathon where the worst ideas win
— GatsbyJS, JavaScript/NodeJS, React, Ant Design, Netlify, Adobe Illustrator
Inspired by Stupid Hacks Toronto, myself and a team of my coworkers decided to hold Queen's first ever Wackathon: A hackathon where the worst ideas win.
The premise is simple, gather a group of people to find the most useless applications of technology that they could think of. This includes projects such as: a camera that takes pictures only when shook, or a super dark mode filter that turns the whole screen black. These are the types of ideas that we need more of in the tech field, and that's what QWacks is for.
My role on the team was "Chief Hackerman," essentially the webmaster. I was in charge of designing and making the website, as well as creating graphics and an identity guide for the event. Check out our website here! The website was made using GatsbyJS, an awesome framework for developing static websites, and was hosted on Netlify.
Unfortunately, due to Covid-19, we had to cancel the event a week before the day. We had a lot more interest than we could've hoped for, and hope to be able to bring QWacks back to Queen's next year!
Mistakes and Lessons Learned
When we started planning the event we only gave ourselves about 8 weeks to put the whole thing together. This meant that getting the website up and running as soon as possible was crucial, so the code overall of the website leaves much to be desired. The first hurdle was getting into Gatsby, and then replacing item by item from a template. This caused a lot of time reading through pre-written code, understanding it, changing it, trail and error testing. It was not an ideal process.
We also learned to put a lot more emphasis on the importance of reaching out to as many people as possible as soon as possible. This means asking companies if they'd like to sponsor, donate prizes, etc. Since it was on such short notice, and in the later part of the "hackathon year," most companies had already allocated their sponsoring budget.
For QWacks Take II, we will update the website overall, reach out earlier to sponsors, and use our already present following to expand to more students.