My god was this a rollercoaster🎢. Ask any of the team involved and they will say the same. 100 hours we planned this hackathon in. From the moment Jacklyn Biggin (Jack) suggested it to actually having a livestream, social media, graphics, publicity, bots, a discord server, a slack server, funding 💰 and anything else you can think of.

Why did we do this to ourselves? 🤔

You might be wondering, why did you endure over 600 hours of stress, wake up in the middle of the night on mutiple occasions and spend 9+ hours a day working on this? Truth be told, I wanted something to do. I wanted to make a change to peoples lives, I wanted to do something about COVID-19 because it had affected so many people.

Honestly, another driving factor, aside from the urge to help was the amazing team that I knew were right behind me the entire time❤ These people who most I had only met once or twice became the driving force behind why I wanted to be such a big part of this project. I pushed myself in every regard and they showed me that there is so much benifit to even making a small contribution. 👨‍👩‍👦

The thing that shocks me is that COVID-19 did what many thought was unlikely. It shook the most developed parts of the world and is making them fall apart. We have to stick together though and we will get through this.🤝

Give it your all 💯

For a side project that I didn't know how I could contribute to, to filling my days with tasks to complete and helping push Hack Quarantine forward, I initally was lost and found myself to be doing PR and outreach📣. Something completely outside my comfort zone. Nevertheless, I always try to give something a go! Many thanks to Tom Goodman and Will Russell for teaching me about how to effectvely bring people in! Overall, we had 3,400 sign up to Hack Quarantine and I can't help but think that some of those people are there because of me 😇.

As well as PR, I ended up being the content manager for the youtube channel ▶️ where I spent many... many... many... hours, timestamping, title-ing, adding descriptions and thumbnails and tagging them. Again, not what I thought I would be doing but then again, I didn't know what to expect 💤.

Towards the end, I ended up leading the moderation of submissions as well as voice acting, video and audio editing and a load of really random things I can't remeber but the last few days were an amzaing dopamine fueled blur. These are some of the tasks that I ended up getting up to now though but honestly, this wouldn't have been possible without the amazing team of 20+ people who all had a part to play. 🎉 No matter what you do in life though, even if you don't like it, it's always worth giving it your all though. It makes everthing more fun about it and when you have a supportive team around you the work doesn't seem like work.

Some mind-blowing stats 🤯📈

The Hack Quarantine live-stream had some crazy stats of it's own such as:

• 340,000 unique stream visitors
• Closing ceremony was featured on the front page of Twitch
• We had more views than Bernie Sanders 😂
• We livestreamed for 568 hours straight
• We only ever dropped 3000 frames in this time
• We livestreamed 1.86TB of upload bandwidth

We also had some amazing event stats aswell:

• We were the biggest student lead hackathon globally as well as being the first 3 week long hackathon in any MLH league.
• 40,000 unique website visitors
• 303 subscribers to the Youtube channel in 28 days
• We were probably the most sleep deprived organisers post event EVER 💤

Online hackathons 📌

For one, while I understand that a traditional hackathon isn't possible in the circumstances, nothing can beat the feeling of staying up coding through the night and similarly, nothing beats colapsing in a heap post event cursing the events name and promising you'll never do it again 😩, only to miss it and do it all over again. While the experience is different in that I didn't have to say up overnight to manage the event, the community that was generated by Hack Quarantine was unlike anything I have ever experienced. People reached out for help, built eachother up and made amazing projects out of an awful situation. I couldn't be more proud of the community.

I look forward to when things return to normal so I can meet with friendos, share colins and appreciate Scotch with the best team I have worked with to date and to also be able to take part in hackathons like //Slash in Berlin and other "IRL" hackathons but until then my friends...

Happy hacking
Tom