los altos hacks VII

everyone is writing hackathon blogs and i feel left out so here we go.

this is a vivid recollection of my experience at Los Altos Hacks VII! an 27 hour in-person hackathon at Juniper Aspiration Dome. i teamed up with @maggie-j-liu to make Magicard! a website that allows you to attach video the physical cards that people can view using ✨ AR ✨!

although it was super crowded, it was still rly fun!

🕙 10:00AM

The venue felt a lot different from when we went ~2 weeks prior because of all the people. It used to feel hollow and empty, but now, it feels... 🐛 alive?

when we got inside the venue, it was already super crowded. it was a bit hard to find a place to sit, but we eventually found a spot. afterward, we went to go check out the sponsor tables! there were a bunch, and it was super fun to pick up all the free swag 👕.

🕚 11:00AM

so, their opening ceremony took like an hour because of all of their sponsors (they had so many 😩), but it gave us a chance to brainstorm more and check out all the tracks. We were especially excited by all of the food that they were gonna give us. (plus a "midnight surprise" — although we were able to guess it by the sponsors 😍🧋)

🕛 12:00PM

we were pretty excited about using Niantic's 8th Wall to develop an AR app, so we spent some time brainstorming ideas and looking at the documentation/example projects. we also ate lunch, which was an enormous slice of pizza, no idea why they ordered that much LMAO.

🕝 2:30PM

we attended the first workshop, which was about using 8th Wall to make a web AR app. it was pretty interesting, and the speaker was very enthusiastic :D

after this, we decided on making Magicard, with

and began hacking :>

🕓 4:00PM

RUIEN APPEARANCE!

sliding over the fact i almost asked a random kid if he was Ruien because i didn't know what he looked like, it was super fun to meet him irl for the first time, and he was super nice.

he also got an amazing custom ID card, which you should totally scan if you can ;)

🕛 12:00AM

hacking! we did a lot of work on the website and got most of the content out. we got AR working in the browser, and we were able to scan image targets and view the videos. after this, we set up the video recording, and I worked on the design, while Maggie set up video uploading and connecting it to the 8th Wall project.

other than that, we ate dinner, did cup stacking, participated in a CTF round, and drank a lot of boba 🧋.

plus, the sponsors for bill.com had left for the night, and we took over their sponsor table!! we were able to do some Sprig advertising (with the poster Ruien gave us)

🕖 7:00AM

pretty fun, we worked until about 3AM. when everybody decided to go to sleep, i chose to stay up, chug 3 cups of boba, and honestly accomplish like nothing. i can hardly remember anything about this time. i think i was high.

in fact this all-nighter was so severe, i lost my taste for boba for (almost) an entire day 😱😱😱

🕛 12:00PM

when everybody woke up, we did some work on the presentation/submmited our devpost submission , and got ready for judging.

we also got to eat mochi waffles 🧇

i also took a 20 minute power nap, which made me feel even more tired DD:

closing thoughts

los altos hacks was one of the most fun experiences ive ever had, even though i was exhausted afterward. we got to meet a lot of amazing people, and it was great seeing all of the other projects people made. huge shoutout to all of the organizers and Maggie for being a very slay teammate

project links if ur interested: