#lahacks

The Project: I basically worked with my friend Lucy to create a "social media website for food porn," and only after did I realize how fucking hard it was to make a social media website out of scratch, with absolutely no experience at all. Lucy and I kept on trying to brainstorm what to make, and since we were both interested in food, this seemed to be the most unique idea since it would generate a lot of unique "food porn" for the internet to see. But it kind of fell flat at the end, although we did our best to learn what we could.

The weapon of choice was Django, which is a web framework made from Python, and with me having no real Python experience, coding what we had was a pain. I had to at least watch 15 YouTube tutorials on how to install and use Django, and even now, we still only have sign ups as the only real functionality of our website. Well, that and a small piece of js that generates random ingredients. Go figure. 

But the front end wasn't actually not that bad. We used BootStrap by Twitter to basically style every single page generated by the Django framework, and in the end, it started kind of coming together. We didn't end up finishing the hack, so Lucy and I decided to just work on it outside of class when we could. 

Other parts: This is the second real hackathon that I've gone to, and I have to admit that it was a great deal of fun even though I only had one other person on my team. It was really interesting and awesome to see companies like Robinhood, SnapChat, Tinder, Microsoft, and etcetera endorsing their products and letting us use their APIs (which to those of you who don't know are basically pieces of code that allow you to use a company's service) for free, although my team didn't really take that opportunity. 

It was also great seeing old friends, some who I haven't seen since the end of high school. Not a lot has changed, to be honest, and it's great that we were able to come back together and hang out like old times (although I was really never part of this clique in the first place, but they're friendly so it didn't really matter to be honest). 

Last but not least, visiting my girlfriend was probably the only non-hacking highlight of my trip. I'm glad that I'm able to visit her amidst all the coding stuff I have to do, and I'm glad she tolerates my nerdiness (even I think it's over the top sometimes). We spent saturday night just talking about everything and anything, I love it when I can do that with someone I love and trust. This is getting a little cheesy so I'm gonna stop LOL