🦄 I know today is technically Copilot day, but honestly? I don't have space for another technical thought in my head right now. In case you missed it, I decided on a whim to submit a project in the n8n/BrightData hackathon.
By itself, it's not saying much. But lifting a 10-year self-imposed hackathon ban is not a light thing for somebody whose version of all-in means every last ounce of everything I had was put into that one project over those two weeks.
So instead of technical today, I've decided it's story time 😇 Welcome to my only slightly dramatized retelling of true events. I'll explain why I don't do hackathons plus the thing that ultimately changed my mind.
So, pull up a chair. I’ll start at the beginning of the end. 🪑🎢
Baby Bottles and Fry Baskets 👶🍔
In 2008, my son was born. That was the time warp. Just a jump to the left, a step to the right, and suddenly my life wasn’t mine anymore.
😵💫 Parenthood is the only true overnight shift. One day you’re yourself, the next you’re permanently on call for a 7lb CEO who screams about everything.
At that point I was still sticking it out in restaurants — where I'd been for close to ten years. It was long hours, long drives, and I had very little to show for it.
By January 2011, I was running on fumes and sheer force of will. Then the snowstorm hit. Everything was frozen, and there I was, alone, opening the restaurant. I ran the whole place myself: front line, back line, fry station, drive-thru, you-name-it.
🦄 "Can't" has never been in my vocabulary. By all accounts I should have stayed home that day, but I wasn't about to let a little ice stop me from doing my job. The fact that I was alone was beyond my control. So I did what I knew to do, in any way I could make it happen.
People were waiting at least thirty minutes, minimum, because one person can only move so fast, but the line just kept coming. At some point in the middle of that non-stop chaos, I looked up and saw my drive-thru customers standing inside.
🚦🤷♀️ Guess they’d been stuck out there long enough because before I knew what happened, a small group had collected in the lobby watching me sprint around like it was a personal comedy show.
In the moment, we made the best of it. We laughed, we joked, and I ran my ass off. Restaurants aren’t designed to run solo, but I made it work.
That day I remember clearly — the day the rest of the world was shut down and I realized the joke was on me. There I was running a one-woman circus while everyone else got to stay home.
I asked myself one question: What exactly are you doing here?
A few months later, I finally walked away, for good.
The Student Loan Circus 🎓💸
That summer, I went back to school. Student loans as the only source of income — my lifeline. Most days, daycare covered things. Some days it didn’t.
And there I was: the older student dragging a kid into class, existing in a universe completely separate from everyone else.
👟 Their concerns were about parties and weekend plans. Mine were homework checks, missing shoes, and bills that didn’t pay themselves.
That was the dichotomy of my reality back then. My life just didn't fit into their box. But by junior or senior year, I’d settled into a rhythm.
Then came the group project.
The monster assignment. Sixty percent of the final grade hanging over all of us. The professor’s grand strategy? Hands up, step back, “do your thing.” Great...
🦄 Seriously, it was chaos dressed up as independence. Pick your projects, pick your teams, no submissions accepted after the deadline for any reason. I should have known hope was limited at that point.
That’s when I suddenly became popular. The same people who’d barely looked my way all semester were now lining up to hitch their wagon to my grade. And of course, they wanted me to lead. Leadership wasn’t an issue — I’d been doing that for years.
🤨 So y’all want me in charge? Fine. But here are the ground rules: I’m not guessing, we’re not bouncing dates around, and certain nights are simply not happening. We meet weekly. We get it done. We move on. Period.
Everyone nodded, even the professor (who I involved early on just in case things went sideways) gave me the “sounds good” approval. For a moment, I actually thought we had a workable agreement. I was wrong.
What followed was six weeks of circus hell. I brought calendars, agendas, timelines. They brought excuses. Too busy. Wrong night. Maybe later.
😖 I've never been so amazed at people claiming to work! They shuffled meetings around like rearranging the board was the same thing as playing the game. And then acted like they deserved extra credit for their trouble.
Meanwhile, my reality lived in another universe: making sure homework got done, hunting down missing shoes, figuring out dinner on nights when the loans had already run dry.
The gap between what they thought mattered and what I was actually carrying was ludicrous.
🤯 To this day, I still don’t know what half of them were even trying to say. All I knew was project due and kid at home. Anything beyond that simply didn't factor into the equation.
The Kicker 💥
When I thought maybe I could finally breathe, the peer reviews landed:
- Failure to communicate. Really? I had a plan mapped out since day one. Emails and group texts were constantly ignored, but somehow that's my fault?
- Doesn’t work well with teams. Teams that don’t show up aren’t teams. At that point it’s just me, and if it’s me, I get it done. That’s the whole story.
- Can’t handle pressure. My favorite.
🔥 You want pressure? I’ll let you babysit my kid, pay my bills, worry about classes and day care, and then we’ll talk about pressure.
The fact that your last-minute date took you away from the project? That’s not pressure. That’s stupidity and not my problem.
I was livid. The immaturity was staggering. This was not the class I thought I’d signed up for. So I marched back to the professor — the same one who’d nodded at my ground rules like they were gospel — expecting backup.
Instead, I got a “solution.” Maybe, he suggested, I should try a group activity. 🤯😱🤬
Translation: hackathon.
The Hackathon I Swore Off 🍕💻
A hackathon? Because obviously the cure for dealing with people who never show up is to lock me in a room with them for forty-eight hours straight. Brilliant.
But this wasn’t optional. Those peer reviews weren’t just comments, they were baked into the grade. My arguments didn’t matter.
😑 Agree or not, I had to make up for the fact that my so-called “team” — that useless cluster of hangers-on and deadweights — had once again barged into my life and left me holding the bag.
And the price this time was a whole weekend I didn’t have to spare.
So I did it. Two days in the lab, stale pizza boxes stacked like trophies, Mountain Dew flowing like tap water. The twenty-year-olds bounced around as if sleep was optional, while I was counting babysitting hours like poker chips and wondering how many cups of coffee equal a nap.
🌪️ It was sheer chaos, and not the good kind.
I got to know people, sure, maybe even understood them a little better. But I was exhausted and my price was sitting at home without me while I watched people bluff their way through the night.
By the end I could barely remember my own name. And I walked out swearing: never again. Not unless I could give it one hundred percent — which I knew I couldn’t, not while a six-year-old still needed me every moment of every day.
Until Now 🔄⏳
Fast-forward to 2025. My son’s grown, living with his dad, and for the first time in nearly twenty years, I have time that actually belongs to me. Then along comes this challenge: n8n, agents, scrapers — basically my bucket list wrapped in one neat little package.
So I broke my rule. WakaTime says I spent more than a hundred hours in two weeks, and that doesn’t even count the black hole of time lost to the n8n UI — or my day job that doesn’t allow time off for my randomness (no matter how forgiving they are of my standups). Nights bled into four-thirty in the morning. Work still started at nine. Weekends turned into catch-up lies I told myself to feel better.
🎨 I coded until my brain short-circuited, then wandered off to Leonardo to play with color because apparently sleep deprivation makes me an artist.
That’s the thing about hackathons: they chew you up. The clock never stops, and you’re not polishing anything — it’s MVP or bust. The urge to overbuild doesn’t go away, but the deadline keeps you honest.
And the prize money? Forget it. If that’s your motivation, just get a job. At least those checks clear. The real payoff is the exhaustion you somehow enjoy, the kind where you know you emptied the tank and came out standing anyway.
So yeah, I’m wrecked and my brain owes me four days of sleep.
But unlike that overnight hackathon years ago, I didn’t walk away muttering “never again.” This time I realized I’d come full circle. Back then, the rule was survival. With a kid, student loans, and no margin for error, I couldn’t afford to burn myself out for fun.
Now, I finally could. And it turns out I didn’t just survive it — I loved it. 💟
When Survival Turns Into Choice 🧭
And maybe that’s the truth hiding in all of this: “never again” usually just means “not right now.”
It’s okay to slam the door shut, to swear something off loudly enough that everyone hears you — sometimes that’s survival. But don’t be surprised when the same thing comes knocking again years later.
And who knows? Maybe the next time it shows up, it brings something a little different with it. 🫶
🛡️ Responsible AI Statement (RAI)
This post was drafted with the assistance of AI. The memories, chaos, and full-circle exhaustion are mine. The words were built together in the style you just read.
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