HackUTD 2024: Ripple Effect

After a few months of troglodytism (at least from the greater internet's perspective), I've found the time to publicize my travels again. This blog relates how I experienced November 15–17, my first weekend back in the US after studying abroad in New Zealand for a semester.

When booking flights home, I faintly hoped circumstances might align just right for me to attend a hackathon on the way. I waited quite a while before booking a flight to maximize my flexibility and was elated to discover that HackUTD: "Ripple Effect" conveniently met all my criteria. This gave me a busy itinerary:

Friday: flying from Auckland to Dallas, sightseeing in Dallas, eating dinner with Addison
Saturday and Sunday: attending HackUTD with Addison, Megan, and Tyler
Sunday night: flying home to Denver

A Friday of Considerable Duration

Friday morning found me watching the streets of Auckland slide past the train window for the last time as I made my way to the airport, where my flight departed directly to Dallas at its scheduled time in the early afternoon. I happened to sit next to a lovely couple from Whanganui who helped me pass the time with friendly chatter.

As someone who seldom travels globally, I was excited to experience a novel phenomenon. Thanks to crossing the International Date Line, my flight arrived in Dallas around 07:00 Friday, several hours before takeoff. That left me an entire day to explore Dallas.

After I landed, it took me a while to find the train to downtown Dallas. One would think I'd have gotten pretty good at travelling after doing it for five months, but apparently I still have room for improvement—it was about forty minutes after boarding the train that I realized I didn't know where to get off, nor was I able to find out, as I hadn't yet renewed my US phone plan. I resolved this problem by arbitrarily picking a stop and navigating downtown with offline maps. This experience reminded me that being prepared is an important aspect of travelling (and life in general).

After walking around downtown, I resolved to visit the Perot Museum of Nature and Science because I heard they have dinosaur fossils, and I've been going through a "dinosaur phase" recently. I wasn't disappointed. Not only did I see several dinosaurs, I was pleasantly surprised by a Quetzalcoatlus skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

Next, I took another train to Fort Worth to rendezvous with Addison, who'd also arrived a day before the hackathon. Even though he wasn't coming from another country, he and I were eager to try Texas barbecue, which proved to be a highly enjoyable experience. Afterward, we took the train back to UTD, where our hotel and the hackathon were located. It was a long late-night ride, but I appreciated the chance to chat for a while.

At this time of year, Dallas is 19 hours behind Auckland, so my Friday lasted 43 hours. Although staying awake for so long is unsustainable, it's interesting to imagine how our productivity could change if days were longer than 24 hours. I was able to accomplish a lot with the extra time.

The Hackathon

Monday morning, Addison and I checked out of our hotel, took a bus to the university, and joined the check-in line. Tyler and Megan soon joined us. Coding officially started at noon, but we didn't know what to make. Lunch, talkative proclivities, and indecision delayed us for about three hours. Eventually, we resolved to create an app for sharing nearby destinations, ideal for the spontaneous adventurer. The main pillars of functionality were:

• Users can view nearby destinations either as thumbnails on a grid or as pins on a map. These destinations expire by a certain date.
• Users can visit destinations, take a selfie of themselves there, and add the selfie to a gallery of images other users have taken at the same location.
• After a destination expires, users can no longer upload selfies, but they can browse the gallery.
• Users can create destinations of their own.

Like previous hackathons, my greatest contribution was a frontend based on Svelte. Since my last hackathon, Svelte 5 has become stable, so I got to use it for the first time. Surprisingly, not only did I learn the major changes quickly, I also approved of all of them. Before, users of the framework had to familiarize themselves with Svelte-specific JavaScript magic, like let automatically making variables "props" and $: cryptically indicating reactive state. Now, runes are an intuitive syntax once the names are memorized. Being a student, I can't assess Svelte's viability for large-scale projects, but for hackathons and personal projects, I think it's so good that it would be preposterous to use any other framework. I look forward to migrating my website from Svelte 4 to Svelte 5.

We used the Google Maps API to embed a map showing the destination locations. For a while, I was perplexed by the existence of the map in DOM but the absence of the map in the viewport. At first, I blamed this behavior on misconfiguration, but later, Addison helped me discover that the height of the map was 0 pixels by default. No wonder it didn't appear!

My mind was focussed on enjoying the first opportunity in several months to see US-based friends in person, rather than fastidiously chronicling everything that might merit inclusion in a blog post, so I don't remember enough to provide as much detail as usual. However, I'm pleased to report that I succeeded in my focus area; I can't imagine a more enjoyable way to return to my home country. I was honored to be a part of what will likely be the last hackathon (at least as a participant) for Tyler and Addison, who are both graduating this semester. I also was glad to work with Megan, the only frequent hackathon attendee at Mines with whom I hadn't partnered before. To these three, who flew to Dallas to spend time coding and hanging out: Thank you!