My experience as a FreyHacks’ organizer [Hackathon Review]

FreyHacks was a 48-hours hackathon held from June 24th to June 26th. As an organizer, I had the tough task of making it a reality. How did it happen?

Have you ever organized a hackathon? For me, this is the second time. Based on my experience from µHacks — the first hackathon I organized —, I knew from the very beginning that it wouldn’t be easy to organize FreyHacks, and in fact it wasn’t. Probably you already know this, but you may want to know: How exactly did I feel about it? I’ll tell you my experience during these 4 months of hard work.

FreyHacks’ website’s landing page

How it all started?

I decided to join the FreyHacks’ organizing team because I wanted to put my effort and newly-acquired knowledge into creating new wonderful events. After all, I like doing my best to help others taking advantage of the abilities that I have. It is true that, during µHacks, I faced lots of difficulties, but yet I was happy because I could help others. Moreover, I got many lessons from that experience, but I wasn’t satisfied with just acquiring knowledge; I wanted to apply it. Then, I saw an announcement at Makerspace (one Discord community, formerly called “Maverick Mushroom”) saying that Kanha, the founder of the aforementioned community and Managing Director at FreyHacks, was recruiting people to organize a new student hackathon. Wishing to help, I immediately filled the application form. Kanha suggested me to join the team as the Director of Operations and I accepted even without thinking. This was the opportunity I was waiting for.

After this happened, we started preparing the main aspects of the hackathon itself. First, we kept on looking for more people to form the team. This was not easy at all. We needed the right people who were willing to put effort and time into contributing to the project. As a result, despite our original idea of having 11 organizers, at the end we were 9. Yet, this didn’t make us give up and instead we moved on into the next steps of organizing the hackathon. Regarding the name, at first we were thinking about calling ourselves “Hack This Summer”, but due to a name clash with Hack This Fall, we decided to change our name. We explored ideas such as “CocoHacks”, “SunnyDayHacks”, and “HackTheHeat”. However, when the “FreyHacks” name came to light, everybody agreed that it was fantastic. We also got a new friend; he is, Gyl, FreyHacks’ mascot and everybody’s favorite golden boar.

Meet Gyl — Our mascot at FreyHacks

Planning and more planning

While we already had lots of tasks to do, this was only the beginning. To work more efficiently, we divided ourselves into smaller teams that had very specific responsibilities: Operations, Design, Marketing and Business Development. This made us easier to keep ourselves focused in our own tasks by giving each member very specific responsibilities that they had to follow. Then, we started doing organizing work itself. We created our website and some branding resources (including my favorites pictures of Gyl), reached out potential sponsors, made marketing to attract hackers, planned the day-of, and much things more.

While organizing a hackathon, it is really important to keep a focus on hacker experience. They are the target audience which provides a meaning to all the work done by the organizers to prepare the event. I’ve heard some people say that a hackathon is defined by the prizes it has, but this is not the case. A good hackathon is not only characterized by having good prizes, but by engaging their hackers the most as well. After all, remember: Beyond giving someone a nice prize, the target of a good hackathon is to help hackers to build a project, learn new technologies, and connect with other participants while having fun. Prizes, swag and other things are just ways towards doing it.

Dancing Gyl picture

The day-of

The event itself was really amusing. We had 15+ workshops and many mini-events. As I cannot share it all due to the fact that it would take an eternity, I’ve selected some of my most remarkable moments which now I very briefly share with you.

Opening ceremony:

We kicked FreyHacks off with our opening ceremony full of hype and excitement for the event. I particularly loved Kanha’s words during the ceremony:

We hope you learn a lot this weekend, level up on your skills as a hacker, build with new technology but our main goal this weekend is to help you find a community. (…) We want you to do more than just code and attend workshops: we want to help you forge friendships with people who’ll support you and help you grow.

I believe that it summarizes really well what FreyHacks is all about.

FreyHacks’ opening ceremony. Original clip here

“Intro to web development with HTML, CSS, and JS” workshop:

This was a workshop I hosted at FreyHacks. I actually hosted 2, both of them were related to web development: “Intro to web development with HTML, CSS and JS” and “Deploying your website with GitHub, Vercel and .xyz”. However, I was more nervous for the former one because it was one of the first workshops at FreyHacks and I’m not very remarkable at public speaking. Yet, I was able to carry out with success and it received a very good reception by hackers. This made me improved my communication skills by gaining more confidence in myself and run the second workshop without any problems.

Small project we did at FreyHacks’ “Intro to web development with HTML, CSS and JS” workshop

MLH Mini-event “MS Paint with Bob Ross”:

We were supposed to paint “Ocean Sunset” while watching to a Bob Ross video. Everyone had fun at it. Yet, somehow I got lost and ended up painting this:

My one of a kind experience painting “Ocean sunset” with Bob Ross

“Introduction to Blender” workshop:

It would seem to me that the Blender design made by Alex in less than an hour is just gorgeous compared to what I can do in a whole day:

A simple, yet beautiful small house

“Non-event” time:

This wasn’t an event, but the time with no events. At this time, while hackers were building their astounding projects, I took advantage to spend some time with them, and also to check that submissions were working. It was really funny to see how participants submitted their hacks in real time, and I found these spectacular.

Ice Cream fight by Vincent

Planning some vacations with Road Code at https://roadcode.tech/

Closing ceremony:

We wrapped a small part of FreyHacks up (I say “a small part” because it happened much more than what we were able to show in our presentation), and presented the winners!

FreyHacks in an image (with tons of transparency

What’s next

Having just finished the event, I’m really happy that I was able to carry out my second hackathon successfully. As I said, organizing a hackathon itself is a lot of work. That’s why having a collaborative team is so valuable. Thanks to it, we were able to make a great experience out of FreyHacks. We got 700+ hackers signed up, 78 hacks submitted, and tons of fun.

I’ve got new lessons, though. I have learned what to do and some no-nos related to hacker experience. Looking at the work of other teams I also got a taste of different methods of hackathon organization which we didn’t use at all for µHacks.

Gyl is happy of having participated at FreyHacks

All in all, while the future of FreyHacks is yet uncertain, I’m totally willing to organize a second season if it’s possible. Full of challenges and lessons, the experience was, if tiring, incredible. FreyHacks has motivated me to keep on giving my best to help other students and people in general to make their dreams come true; I’ll never give up on this task. I look forward to start new projects and activities which I like as well as seeing you all next time. With that, I wrap up my experience during the first season and wish you: Happy hacking!

This post was originally published on Medium by Gary Strivin' (link).