Another semester, another HackRU at Rutgers. It has been a strangely busy semester; this being the first and last hackathon of the Spring Season.

Andrew and I had an idea to create an checkers game. At first we wanted to have our Raspberry Pis play each other and compare the results of using different algorithms. However, we pivoted to Twitch Plays Checkers, without any Raspberry Pis at all. We now have a more ambitious goal of gathering six Raspberry Pis together to play Chinese Checkers; I think that would be quite impressive.

We arrived at Rutgers and quickly got to work. I wasn’t very interested in talking with sponsors and I didn’t see any swag that I absolutely had to have. (Seriously, I have way too many useless gadgets and toys from hackathons already.) I did regretfully miss all of the tech talks; I was so focused on my project that I missed a few interesting ones (none that would have helped with the project though).

One of the sponsors brought giant hamster balls for racing, but I had no interest in getting sweaty and gross at the beginning of a hackathon any more than I already was. There was also the Alienware truck that had been at RPI just a few days before.

Now for the real talk, and I don’t mean to speak too harshly of HackRU; I personally know how difficult organizing a hackathon can be, but it’s really about the little things. First, there wasn’t enough food. I’m used to hackathons having tons of food and snacks, but there just never seemed to be enough–except for the very excessive 30 gallons of ice cream at 11pm. For dinner on Saturday, they ran out completely and had to order more food for those who didn’t get any. I assume this is because they had 1000 people there that night, and they weren’t expecting nearly that many. For breakfast the next day, I had a quarter of a doughnut, a bit of very greasy scrambled eggs, and one soggy French toast stick. Perhaps I just hold HackRU to a higher standard, this being their fourth year.

On top of the lack of food, the lead organizer insisted on blasting music to the entire venue from about 2am to 9am. Several of the people at my table alone asked for the music to be turned down/off at many points during the night but the organizers refused. I thought this was completely unacceptable. For HackRPI, we discussed the idea of playing music many times: we all agreed to keep it very limited because we knew most people didn’t want to listen to someone else’s music while they’re trying to work or sleep.

Meanwhile, Andrew, Ariel, and I did manage to finish out project quite well; however, we did not have time to integrate Twitter and Twilio. I thought it worked remarkably well, and it was really cool to see our three different parts of the project come together at the end. I don’t think we really impressed any of the judges all that much, but it doesn’t matter to me. Despite the overall disappointing experience, I was quite happy with the project my team produced.