Highthon

I've gone though my first hackathon.

While I was making several projects with vanilla JS, I learned about Highthon, a hackathon for high school students on February 17-18 2024, and thankfully, I was selected as the final contestant, so I participated with React, related frameworks, and git in my head for two weeks.

The team was consisted of two frontend developers including me, one backend developer and one designer, and the theme was "dream", which is a bit abstract one.

The idea was "an alarm app that sends dangerous messages if you don't turn it off," which was quickly decided in an hour and went into development immediately.

I was in charge of developing the main page through React, but when I found it difficult to implement the template made by the designer, so the team member did my part.

Thus I had no choice but to do small things that could be implemented with my own skills.

When there was nothing more peripheral I could do with my skills, I studied Next.JS from scratch to build up my development skills from midnight to 1 p.m., the deadline for submission.

Previously, I only knew about the Create React App, which is now out of support at React, so I conducted the learning according to the updated version of Next.JS 14, which wasn't easy at first, but after studying for a long time by asking people questions, I became somewhat embodied and experienced the effectiveness of learning by doing activities such as refactoring the entire portfolio web page into Next.JS.

Since then, the team members have made the app perfect and successfully performed the presentation, so our team finally won the grand prize!

It was a satisfactory and happy result, but I felt a lot of guilty that I didn't contribute much to the team due to my lack of development skills, so I didn't really feel it even though I presented a very good award called the Grand Prize.

There seems to be a strong need for constant practice in the future to be able to freely deal with various frameworks such as React, Next.JS, and React Native.

For me, the 9th high tone was a good opportunity to realize the object level my skills, and at the same time, it was a good experience to participate in hackathon for the first time to create a service and actually collaborate together.

And it was also a good networking time to create new relationships and strengthen the existing relationships.

Based on the feedback I got today, I will come back with a more advanced look at the next event, and finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Highthon for providing me with this great opportunity.