Four Weeks, Seven Thousand Chances, and the Return of the Builder

 

Three weeks ago, an email landed in my inbox.

A hackathon.

I almost laughed.

I hadn't joined one since university (more than twenty years ago) and I never missed them. The sleep deprivation, the smell nerds (like me) not showering, the performative enthusiasm fueled by bad pizza and worse coffee… no thanks. That chapter felt closed.

But this one was different.

Four weeks. No 48-hour madness. No badge of honor for staying awake until hallucinations set in. Just a long runway and the freedom to pace myself. That meant I could keep my day job, then disappear into the build during evenings and -crucially- weekends.

And as luck would have it, I had three weekends entirely to myself. No plans. No obligations. Just time.

One of the hackathon tracks caught my attention: an app for people living the nomad van life.
A life I once tasted.
A life that still whispers to me, even if I haven't answered the call again.

So I entered. Solo.

What followed was intense, in a quiet, deliberate way. Fourteen to sixteen-hour sessions on weekends. Long evenings that slipped into very late night during the week, after work was done and the world went quiet. It reminded me that I'm still a builder. That muscle never really goes away.

The challenge, though, was different. This wasn't my idea. The idea wasn't born from my own boredom. It was defined for me, by the hackathon, by an influencer with a (somewhat fuzzy) vision of what she wanted.

That constraint was interesting. It forced me to listen instead of invent. To execute instead of explore. To respect a brief that wasn't mine.

And today, four days before the deadline, I submitted my entry.

It's solid. Thoughtful. Well executed. I'm confident it belongs near the top.

But here's the absurdity: there are almost 7000 entries. And two judges.

The first cut isn't even about the app. It's about a pitch video. Three minutes to sell it. Marketing over making. And that, frankly, isn't my strongest suit.

There's a very real chance they'll never see the app itself.

Seven thousand videos at three minutes each is 350 hours of watching. There's no universe in which that happens. So I imagine transcripts fed into an LLM. Or some automated scoring. Or (perhaps most likely) randomness.

Ah, randomness.
The quiet fairy godmother of business decisions.
The unseen hand that so often decides who makes it and who doesn't.

If that's how it plays out, so be it.

I built something good. I enjoyed the process. I proved to myself that the fire still burns, and that I can still disappear into a problem and come back with something real.

And with all this, I wonder if I've gained weight with all the pizzas and burgers consumed over the last 3 weeks...