tldr;

If you want to win at something, do something no one else wants to do.

Don’t sleep on the sponsored prize track. It can significantly cut down on the brainstorming process

Check out the project at DevPost

First Hackathon Win

I went to HackUMBC without a project in mind. I honestly just wanted to hangout and network with people.

Although my project is nothing impressive, I was proud of its simplicity.

Arriving at the event

The line to sign in extended outside of the building and all the way to the parking lot.

I instantly felt imposter syndrome when I saw a kid bring carrying a monitor with him. He is not here to mess around.

I started talking to people in line and a few students from my university showed up and practically cut in line with me!

Assembling a team

I ended up with a team of 4, to my surprise.

It started off when I said hey to a girl (Bea). Then a lone freshmen introduced himself (Vishwa) and wanted to join our team, although me and Bea didn’t even agree to be in a team yet.

So we were now 3 and then a friend from the software engineering club (Abim) tagged along and the team is now 4

Brainstorming

This part was really hard. Everyone in my team had a hard time coming up with an idea. Bea didn’t feel too good so she had to go home. So it was down to 3.

I saw a pamphlet at the MLH booth about winning prizes for the sponsor tracks and Adobe Express was one of them. I was dead set on making an Adobe Express add-on because of the reward.

Adobe Express Add-On eureka moment

The reward from Adobe is a wireless Wacom drawing tablet and a small JBL bluetooth speaker. I’ve always wanted to try out a drawing tablet.

I can’t recall if it Vishwa or Abim who brought up inserting chemistry symbols because they found an API that returns chemistry symbols but I initially didn’t give it a lot of thought.

I started looking at the past winning submissions for this this track and there was an add-on that won, where it generates math equation, given a LaTeX input.

I started putting two and two together and came up with an add-on that returns chemistry symbols as an image, similar to the add-on that returns math symbols.

Implementation

Fortunately, there were code samples that I was able to get ideas from. The JS SDK that Adobe Express provided was really intuitive. The entire development process was so simple, it only took me a few hours to complete an minimum viable product.