Removing the Bare Minimum Limiter — Part 2

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Week of chaos, exams, a hackathon I almost didn't attend, and somehow, a W.

There's this thing that happens to me at hackathons.

I show up, I build, we lose. Or I don't show up, and somehow, we win. It's happened enough times that it stopped being a coincidence and started feeling like a curse. Like my physical presence was the variable that broke everything.

So when the Harvard Health Hackathon landed on the same week as my university exams; same area, same Lagos heat, I made peace with not going. I told my team I'd be around if they needed me. I wasn't planning to walk through those doors.

Then I walked through those doors.

The Last One In

I was the last participant to arrive.

My team had been there for a while. The energy was already off, deployment issues, things not connecting, the usual chaos that shows up right before a deadline. I dropped my bag and started asking questions.

The main problem: we couldn't deploy the blockchain anywhere. Our backend needed to ping it, and a free Render server couldn't handle it. We were tight on time, no budget for a quick VPS, no clean solution in sight.

I sat with it for a minute.

Then: run everything on my laptop.

Backend. Blockchain. Frontend. All of it local, on my machine, turned into a server. Tunnel only the frontend through ngrok. Print the prototype. Walk into the pitch room.

It worked.

PharmChain

The product was PharmChain: a blockchain-based pharmaceutical supply chain tracker built for the Nigerian healthcare system. Counterfeit drugs are a real, deadly problem here. PharmChain puts every drug on-chain, traceable from manufacturer to patient, unforgeable.

It was the kind of idea that makes judges lean forward.

And when my teammate stood up to pitch; he was professional. Clean slides, confident delivery, answered every question. The judges didn't just clap. They offered to put in a good word with the managing directors of companies in the space.

I was sitting in the back trying not to manifest a loss.

The Announcement

You know that specific kind of fear; where you want something badly enough that your body starts preparing for disappointment before the results are even out?

That was me. Sitting there. Running the mental math on every hackathon I'd physically attended.

They called our name.

I broke the loop.

Everything Else That Happened This Week

Because apparently one thing isn't enough:

Exams. Multiple. Same week. Still standing.

Leetcode Blind 75. I'm at 40/75 in 13 days. Doing at least 2 problems daily, mastering patterns, not just solving, understanding why the solution works. In my free time I'm watching coding interview breakdowns on YouTube and running mock interviews.

Fog of War. This started as a hackathon submission. I was literally one minute late to submit. But I'm still building it. Full sprite system, better controls, tighter game mechanics. This isn't a hackathon project anymore. This is a game I'm building until it's actually peak. Catch the vibe on X: https://x.com/coder0214h

Stackd with Koded. Week 2 with the first paying cohort. People are showing up. That means something.

5 rejection letters. They came in a batch one morning. Bending Spoons, Twilio, Remote, a couple others. It stings, I won't pretend it doesn't. But I applied, I got feedback, I improved the resume, I kept moving. That's the only response that makes sense.

VC conversations from the hackathon. The judges' interest in PharmChain opened doors I didn't expect. More on this as it develops.

The Pattern

I used to think my presence at hackathons was the problem. Ten-plus events of building and losing while sitting right there, it messes with your head.

But I think the real variable was never me being there or not. It was whether I showed up ready. Whether I had something to give when things broke.

This week, things broke. I fixed them. We won.

That's the limiter coming off, not confidence, not motivation. Just doing the work until you're the person the team calls when it matters.

More next week. Stay Cracked.

— Köded