Keeping the style and prose minimal today with a quick update from the past weekend:
🌲 TreeHacks 💻
Last weekend, I participated in Stanford’s annual hackathon, TreeHacks. The weekend consisted of a 36 hour coding/building/engineering challenge, workshops, and speakers. Apprehensive to hackathons due to their necessary sacrifice of sleep and paired consumption of caffeine and sugar, I was surprised to leave the weekend inspired (and with a prize!).
I worked with a team of two other Neo Scholars. We met on Slack before and coordinated when we arrived to the event. Quickly we gelled as a team, sharing responsibility, and had a blast building our project.
💭 The Project: Eddy 🎙️
Imagine you're sitting in your favorite coffee shop and a unicorn startup idea pops into your head. You open your laptop and choose from a myriad selection of productivity tools to jot your idea down. It’s so fresh in your brain, you don’t want to waste any time so, fervently you type, thinking of your new idea and its tangential components. After a rush of pure ideation, you take a breath to admire your work, but disappointment. Unfortunately, now the hard work begins, you go back though your work, excavating key ideas and organizing them.
Eddy is a brainstorming tool that brings autopilot to ideation. Sit down. Speak. And watch Eddy organize your ideas for you.
Read our full project post here
📓 Takeaways 🚀
The current of excitement, tenacity, and skill was so strong it created a vortex of motivation and inspiration. Being in the moment, soaking up the unapologetic and esthetic nerdy-ness (and stench!) helped me ride this current, picking up speed with each new person I met or idea that flit across my mind.
I expected to leave burnt out, but rather, the weekend boosted me like a pinball paddle. Similar to my athletic feats, this mental endeavor helped me strengthen my development confidence while illuminating my room for growth.
To add to the positive vibes, we were awarded the Best Natural Language Processing Hack prize!
I am actually really excited about working, building, and coding after the weekend. Lets see how long it lasts 😉.
Have a great weekend,
—bjar