Hackathon experince?

Hey guys this week we’ll be talking about a hackathon I participated in a little ago. We’ll cover my experience, what me and my teammates came up with, and what I plan on doing next time. Also the spoiler alert we lost.

Experience

So I want to start off by saying this was my first hackathon ever. I was only going off my friends’ stories and my hopes were high because it sounded really fun but I was a bit skeptical due to it being online. But I was worried for nothing. I had a great time with my friends and we participated in many of the events they hosted. My personal favorite had to be the ms paint Bob Ross session. They also had a costume contest, Q & A with developers in the cyber security space, webinars about cyber security, and I was able to get a mock interview while there. Since we had a little less than two days to work on our idea I didn’t want to sleep. I did this so I could go to the events and still work on the project. This was a good and bad Idea because I fell asleep and almost missed our time to present. So overall I had a great time. I got to code with friends and make new connections at the same time.

Project

The hackathons theme was cyber security. My team decided to make a website and chrome extension to help the user browse the internet safely. We planned on doing this in a couple ways. The first way is to alert the user that they are going to a sketchy page. We used the extinction to retrieve the information needed. Then we send it to the backend where we are using google’s SafetyNet Safe Browsing API to determine if the page they are going to is safe. We also used the pwned api to find out when the user has had a breach and notify them through SMS and the dashboard on the website. We used twilio to integrate the SMS. We also wanted to help the user keep track of their internet activity. So we tracked what sites they went to and how long they were there and displayed it to them. We let the user know of irregular site visits on the. One of the members on my team achieved this using machine learning which I have not yet looked into yet. Overall our goal is to keep the user informed.

What I would do different

Even though I had a great time there are few things I would do differently and will do differently next time. First thing would be do a bit more research on the technologies you and your team will need. The Second thing is SLEEP!!! I really don’t want to be in that situation again almost letting the team down. Lastly I hope to win the next hackathon.

If you haven’t done a hackathon I would highly recommend it. I would also say don’t worry about winning just have a good time (still try to win). You don’t need to have a group already there some some people showed up looking for others who didn’t have a group and worked with them. That about raps up this blog and I’ll be sure to write another when I do my next hackathon have a good day.