Two months before the actual hackathon started, I asked two of my friends if they wanted to do a hackathon with me. They said yes. That's the part of the story that doesn't sound dramatic at all, but it's the part that determined everything that came after it.
We were all computer science students, but none of us had built anything close to what the USAII Global AI Hackathon was asking for. So we spent two months preparing for it. We divided up what we needed to learn and roughly assigned ownership of different parts of the eventual build. We were a team of three. One teammate would handle the frontend and design. Another would help me with the backend. I'd handle the rest of the backend myself, plus the final documentation and demo video, as the team lead. We studied. We practiced. We took the qualifier exam and ranked 95th out of the 424 accepted submissions in our track to make it into build week.
At that moment, I remember feeling excited about build week and thinking “We’ve got this in the bag.” Yeah, little did I know.
After the kickoff, we came up with the idea together: Init., an AI powered app that turns a vague idea into a 48-hour action plan. Next we split the work the way we'd planned. Then build week actually started, and the plan met reality.
My teammate responsible for frontend and design spent an entire day designing the layout in Figma. The design itself was genuinely good. But when she coded it the next day, it wasn't responsive and I realized that she didn’t know enough flutter to code the front-end properly. I looked at it and realized I couldn't build on top of it as-is. So I rebuilt the frontend myself, on top of an already-tight timeline, on top of everything else I still had to do.
Then my other teammate, who was supposed to help with the backend, lost access to his laptop for almost the entire build week. It didn't return from repair until two days before submission. So the backend became mine too, in full, on top of the frontend I'd just taken over.
By the time he was back with a working laptop, I had already finished the backend and there was only room for testing. So that's what we did together: he ran testing rounds, we found what was breaking, and we fixed bugs side by side with what was left of our time.
Then it was hours before the deadline, and it was just me writing the technical documentation, editing the demo video, and going back through every screen rewriting the UX copy so the app actually felt like a finished product and not something assembled in a panic. We submitted at 2:37 a.m., about six hours before the deadline closed.
I want to be honest about something: I didn't handle all of this because I'm naturally calm under pressure or know how to do everything. I registered for this hackathon not really knowing what I was doing, as a team lead, in a competition at this level. I learned almost everything I needed to know by needing to know it immediately, with no time to ease into it. Leading, for me in this hackathon, didn't look like confidently delegating and checking in on a plan that was working. It looked like watching the plan fall apart piece by piece: a design that couldn't ship, a teammate who physically couldn't contribute for reasons entirely outside his control, while I absorbed each setback as more work landed on my plate, with the deadline approaching.
We ended up making it to the finals. But when I look back at that week, the finalist placement isn't actually the part I'm proudest of. I'm proud of the fact that I survived the pressure and built something real, despite the fact that pretty much everything that could go wrong did. That's the part of me I didn't know was there until a hackathon like this forced it out.
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