So here's what I did today.
I signed up for the Build with MeDo Hackathon on Devpost. $50,000 in prizes. 30 days. 2,343 people already registered before me. And my coding experience is basically: I once changed the background color on a Wordpress site and felt like a hacker for a week.
The twist: MeDo is a no-code platform. You describe what you want in plain English, an AI builds the app. So technically you don't need to know how to code. In theory.
I figured the smartest play wasn't to compete for the grand prize — 2,000+ developers with years of experience are going after that. There's also a Creative Content Award (10 winners × $500) for blog posts and videos about your project. And a Community Choice Award (5 × $500) voted on by the MeDo Discord. Those are way more winnable if you show up consistently and actually document the journey.
So I'm documenting the journey. That's what this post is.
What I'm building
It's called Evengood. The pitch is one sentence: end every day on an even, good note.
You open it at night, spend 60 seconds typing how your day went — the rough parts, the wins, whatever. Evengood gives you back a short, calm 2-minute audio reflection that actually mentions what you said, names one real win, and gives you one clear thing to carry into tomorrow. It saves a one-line journal entry automatically. Over a month you end up with a readable year-in-sentences thing.
I picked this because (a) I'd actually use it, (b) it's small enough to be buildable in 30 days of evening work, and (c) the story is easier to tell than "I built another todo app."
The plan
- Week 1: post publicly every day (you're reading day 1), set up the scaffolding in MeDo, don't over-scope.
- Week 2: build the three core features. One per day. No heroics.
- Week 3: polish, deploy, record a demo video.
- Week 4: write the retrospective, rally the community, submit on Devpost.
Why I'm writing this on day zero of code
Because by the end of 30 days this is either a story about a no-code beginner who shipped a real app and won some money, or it's a story about a no-code beginner who tried and flamed out on day 11. Both are useful. Both are worth writing down.
If you want to watch what happens, I'll be posting on X too (I won't link it here to keep this post tag-compliant — you can find me from my profile). Or just follow along on DEV.
Back tomorrow with day 2.
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