(Sample post: the people and events in this story are made up for display purposes.)
Right before the school holidays, our teacher shared a weekend hackathon for high schoolers in the class chat. I’d only learned a bit of coding from online videos, and my hands were literally shaking when I signed up. Worst case, I figured, I’d get two days of free pizza.
On the day, the organisers put us into random teams. Mine was a Year 9 girl who could draw anything, a Year 11 guy who talked at about 2x speed, and a quiet kid who kept his headphones on the whole time and typed ridiculously fast. We stood at a whiteboard for half an hour with zero ideas. Then the artist mentioned her neighbour’s cat had gone missing, and the whole street’s group chat was a mess of blurry photos.
So that became our project: if you spot a cat, snap a photo and tap the map, and the owner can see every sighting sorted by place and time. I built the screens, headphones kid did the data, the artist drew the cutest cat icon ever, and our fast talker was in charge of the pitch.
On the first night I spent two whole hours on a button that just would not work. The bug? I’d misspelled one word. We laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe, and somewhere in there we stopped being strangers.
Then demo time. The venue Wi-Fi died and our app wouldn’t load. The room was packed and my brain went blank. Our artist grabbed a marker, sketched every screen on paper, and we “clicked” through the app by flipping pages. The judges cracked up. A few people actually clapped.
We didn’t win first place, but we got People’s Choice: four stickers and a box of chocolates. The cat sticker lives on my laptop now. What I took away: you can learn as you go, and good teammates matter more than perfect code.