Three days before, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to eat home food for a while (since I’d be in Canada), so I decided to try cooking dinner for the first time. On Tuesday, I made soy sauce salmon with rice, seaweed, and cucumber. On Wednesday I made fried rice using the leftover rice. On Thursday I made pineapple pizza for breakfast. It was for breakfast because…

My flight was really early, 6 am on Friday, which meant two things: 1) I was missing a day of school, so I spent Wednesday finishing my schoolwork early.

2) I had to wake up super early! On Thursday, I packed my bags, then slept early at 8 (so I ate the pizza for breakfast instead of dinner) to wake up at 2:30 am the next morning (that’s when I sleep sometimes…). I went out at 3:00 am, and everything seemed so empty. The roads were nice and quiet. By 3:30, I arrived at Logan, then reached my gate at 4. I slept for a little, then it was my flight.

I arrived at 8 am and finished my HEXT homework. Using the code for http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/, I also had some fun training a character RNN model on my Discord messages. It improved pretty quickly, and it was fun to watch.

I also made a little game for fun which scraped posts from r/aita and given the text, had you guess what the final verdict was.

Soon the waiting area for Hack the North opened up, so I went over to meet some people. It was fun chatting to them and then it was time to leave through the bus. I sat next to one of the people I had met, a computer science major (tbh most people there were), and we talked about the internet, graphics processing, and a host of other things.

When we arrived it was time for dinner. Afterwards I went to the team formation activity, where I met two people who also wanted to try out a hardware project. I was excited because that was my goal this hackathon, so we formed a team and moved over to the Hardware Bay. We discussed project ideas. Our first idea was glasses that gave subtitles about the world around you, but it was a little unfeasible. We decided instead to do the reverse, where you had a wearable shirt with a screen that displayed subtitles of what you were saying to the world. We requested our hardware and went to bed.

I got 5-6 hours of sleep, which isn’t too bad for an overnight hackathon! I was a little worried about sleep - I also only got around 4-6 the day before and I wasn’t expecting to sleep much the second night when I was in the thick of the hackathon.

The next day we picked up our hardware and were told that there were no microphones left. We were slightly concerned, because that was a big problem. Our project depended on the user being able to speak into a microphone that we could get the sound packets from. We decided to go for a trip to Canadian Computers & Electronics, 1.5 miles away. To get there faster, we took e-scooters. It was my first time on an e-scooter and it was a little frightening to be honest, but we were able to get to the store, buy the microphone, and return safely.

By lunchtime we had the hardware assembled and the pygame display working.

Assembling the hardware and reading the documentation was really helpful for learning how electronics/everything worked. My soldering abilities I was developing came in handy when we needed to de- and re-solder parts of the microphone to make it less bulky.

By dinner, we got the transcription working, so we went out to get boba to celebrate. I had a blueberry boba, which was delicious.

We 3D printed a case for the screen adn the raspberry pi 5 that powered it, which was really helpful because the rp5 went up to 98 C sometimes and this was supposed to be wearable.

We found a large sweater and spray painted it completely black (my first time spray painting!).

We then sewed it all together and made a devpost for submission. We submitted 2 minutes before the deadline, but we made it! We celebrated by taking 1-hour naps before we had to prepare for the presentation. We made a script and practiced our presentation, then it was time and we went, and then the hackathon was nearly over.

My earlier prediction was right: I only got 1 hour of sleep over the night. There were so many sponsors at the event that gave out swag (and there was so much swag also!) as well as delicious snacks like soup, chocolate, kinder eggs, and chips available. The event was super fun overall.

It was time to return, so we got back onto the bus, which was a school bus. Then it was time for my flight home. I was utterly exhausted returning on Monday, but happy.

You can find our github repo here: https://github.com/Project-Tee/Project-Tee/tree/main

Or a more detailed description of the project on devpost: https://devpost.com/software/project-tee

This post is super late and thus will be super brief, but in February I went to ASPR, a camp similar to SPARC, but held in rural Taiwan rather than UC Berkeley. I went to SPARC back in 2022 during the summer, and was excited for ASPR.

My flight was first from BOS to SFO, then from SFO to TPE in Taiwan. The whole trip was a little over 20 hours. The food was delicious and I completed all my schoolwork for the week (ASPR was held during winter break but still overlapped with a few days of school).

I had met another person from Boston going to ASPR in BOS (and they were who I was assigned to introduce during third-party introductions, a twist on typical introductions) and we met another person at SFO. A third person was also going to ASPR but we didn’t see them on the plane. Once we landed at TPE, we met up with a larger group of students headed to ASPR. An instructor was there to drive us to the camp, which was held on a sheep farm in the mountains, and, as I learned later, the last (and only) location permitted to be built on those mountains as a touristy spot. The ride was 2-3 hours and filled with so many twists and turns that I felt sick by the end of it. At camp I met everyone, fed sheep, and picked up Modeling Social Behavior from the book pile. Jetlagged, I fell asleep at 9 and awoke promptly the next morning at 5.

I spent my time walking around the balcony and exploring the place. It was truly beautiful, from the sunrise and sunshine to the nature that surrounded us. It felt like paradise.

I had a few more one on ones the next day, herded the sheep, said hi to the local puppy, and felted wool I sheared from the sheep. One instructor tried to teach me to do handstands, and I hiked through the forest in the mornings. I cut bamboo for the first time, led the grill at a BBQ, danced, sang karaoke, and then went on a midnight surprise adventure where we only returned at 3. I visited TSMC’s museum, a mall, Daxi bridge, ate street food, ran a game theory game, then had hot pot and boba for dinner. I fed the sheep from my hand and tried new fruit that made me feel fuzzy. I raced to Taipei 101 with friends, and walked along the road, ducking when cars came near (we yelled “Car!”). I learned why “black sheep” is a phrase - people did avoid the singular black sheep in the flock, LOL. I read books and enjoyed nature and had fun.

On the flight back, I tried beef noodle soup (a staple of Taiwan) at the airport, and it was soo good. I took home a couple of books, as well as some pokemon plushies and an IKEA golden retriever plushy. Our flight from SFO to BOS was cancelled, so we flew to NJ where we overnighted at the airport (no hotel because none of us were over 21). I felt exhausted but happy when I finally returned home.

I met so many new friends and I truly think ASPR was an amazing experience that changed who I am as a person.

I used to think that ASPR had shown me paradise on earth, hidden from the world and tucked away in a sheep farm in the rural mountains of Taiwan where I could spend all day walking through nature and talking of technology and philosophy. I realize how that all it had done was open my eyes to show me that paradise was already here on earth. There are nature walks hidden near me, too, connecting Joyce Miller’s Meadow to Arlington’s Great Fields. There are interesting people to have conversations with in my hometown - all people are naturally interesting, due to their deep, rich existences and lives. We just don’t notice it normally. We live in the cyberpunk paradies of my sci-fi dreams, where we’ve bested nature with technology and we can make anything we imagine with what we have around us. All we need to do is open our eyes.

I had been to larger hackathons like Blueprint before, so seeing a contest run by a high school was pretty wholesome, in the way that smaller clubs are more wholesome than big ones, since you see the hiccups and imperfections along the way. One example is the awards ceremony, where instead of having this polished rehearsed ceremony where there’s a stage and people are secretly told beforehand and do demos, it was a slideshow and a quick receiving of awards. Or the pin maker, where we were directed to a different room to make pins at Angelhacks, here we weren’t really told about it except in quick passing and we had access throughout.

I arrived a day early to join in on the learnathon. My club members weren’t coming until later, so during lunch when I saw two people asking a third person if they wanted to join their group, I asked if they needed a fourth. Thus the team was formed. They announced the hackathon theme was “sidequest”, so we started brainstorming over dinner. The food at the hackathon was amazing, by the way.

We found a room for ourselves, and came up with the idea of a google extension. One of the members had experience with making google extensions, and they said it was super simple, just like a webpage but with a manifest.json file. Our idea was that the google extension would alert you every few minutes to take a break by playing a minigame (a “sidequest”). We headed out to go to a workshop for making a website where they were giving out free boba!

I headed to bed around 12, and woke up early the next day for breakfast. I saw that my club members were here and greeted them, then I returned to my team. The rest of the day went pretty smooth. We made different minigames, a logo, and a default container webpage with a points system. We named it SideQuest.

Then it was time for judging. The way it worked is we first a peer judging system, then the organizers would judge the submissions. We took turns presenting and checking out other teams, where we voted for them using candy!

Before the awards ceremony, we cleaned up our room and one of my teammates, who was a student at BB&N, gave us a tour. Then we returned and learned that we won first place overall, both in judging and by having the most candy votes! We were really happy and high-fived each other before going to the front to claim our prize (Raspberry Pis). We took our candy cup and also more candy from a giant bag. The candy was sweet.

Finally, we went out for pictures, then everyone began to leave. We exchanged contact info, and the hackathon was over.

You can download our app from the Chrome Web Store here. You can check out our code here.