<commit_before>---
layout: post
title: WildHacks
---

It's 10:53 AM on a Saturday morning. My friend [Summer](https://twitter.com/suymilk) and I are attending our first intercollegiate hackathon - [Wildhacks](http://wildhacks.org). We've secured a spot in the corner of the Northwestern Room on the second floor of the student center overlooking the Lakefill. We've also laid claim to a power strip.

![wildhacks-corner](../images/wildhacks-corner.jpg)

We're not in this hackathon for the prize money - we're doing it just to have the experience of building something in 24 hours or less, and also so we'll be a little less scared of doing hackathons in the future. I'll be liveblogging WildHacks just for [shiggles](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shiggles).

### 11 AM
As expected, this hackathon is overwhelmingly male. The group of guys next to us have already requested a whiteboard (they were told that there's a lot of paper that they can use).

`verbatim`

+ "That's the most expensive mouse pad I've ever seen."
+ "We're counting the number of commits, not the quality of commits."

`caffeine intake`
+ 1 cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee

### 1 PM
Highlights of the opening ceremony were the Syndio Social Nicolas Cage Challenge (casually include Nic Cage somewhere in your project) and PayPal/Braintree/Venmo's API walkthrough - apparently it's really easy to build a mobile app to charge people to pet your blind dog (so you can raise money for his eye surgery, obviously).

![opening-ceremony](http://i.imgur.com/cXhJnFi.jpg)

Summer and I outlined our web app idea over lunch and are ready to start hacking. We're both student fellows at the [Knight Lab](http://knightlab.northwestern.edu), a news innovation lab on campus, so our project is going to be news-centric. We've set up our Github repo and 

`verbatim`

+ "I just charged myself $216 to pet my own dog."
+ "So cute, so blind."

`caffeine intake`

+ 1 can of Diet Coke<commit_msg>update 1pm post<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: WildHacks
---

It's 10:53 AM on a Saturday morning. My friend [Summer](https://twitter.com/suymilk) and I are attending our first intercollegiate hackathon - [Wildhacks](http://wildhacks.org). We've secured a spot in the corner of the Northwestern Room on the second floor of the student center overlooking the Lakefill. We've also laid claim to a power strip.

![wildhacks-corner](../images/wildhacks-corner.jpg)

We're not in this hackathon for the prize money - we're doing it just to have the experience of building something in 24 hours or less, and also so we'll be a little less scared of doing hackathons in the future. I'll be liveblogging WildHacks just for [shiggles](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shiggles).

### 11 AM
As expected, this hackathon is overwhelmingly male. The group of guys next to us have already requested a whiteboard (they were told that there's a lot of paper that they can use).

`verbatim`

+ "That's the most expensive mouse pad I've ever seen."
+ "We're counting the number of commits, not the quality of commits."

`caffeine intake`

+ 1 cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee

### 1 PM
Highlights of the opening ceremony were the Syndio Social Nicolas Cage Challenge (casually include Nic Cage somewhere in your project) and PayPal/Braintree/Venmo's API walkthrough - apparently it's really easy to build a mobile app to charge people to pet your blind dog (so you can raise money for his eye surgery, obviously).

![opening-ceremony](http://i.imgur.com/cXhJnFi.jpg)

Summer and I outlined our web app idea over lunch and are ready to start hacking. Since We're both student fellows at the [Knight Lab](http://knightlab.northwestern.edu), a journalism-technology lab, our project is news-centric. Things we've done so far: setting up a Github repo, an initial deploy to Heroku to get a live link to our project, and starting to dive into some APIs we'll be using.

`verbatim`

+ "I just charged myself $216 to pet my own dog."
+ "So cute, so blind."

`caffeine intake`

+ 1 can of Diet Coke
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