[LIVEBLOG] 2 Girl 1 HackMIT by Leya E. '30

Hello! It is currently September 19th, 2026, which means it’s the first day of HackMIT! What is HackMIT? Well I’m so glad you asked! HackMIT is one of the world’s largest hackathons⁠01 this is directly from their website btw , and it takes place right here, on MIT’s campus, from September 19th-20th. College students from all around the world are competing! What is a hackathon you may be wondering? Well, the basic point is to build some sort of working project, whether software or hardware based, in 24 hours. And if the judges like your project, you can win some pretty cool prizes!⁠02 one of the options for the first place prize is a whole tv and theater system???

While a lot of people do hackathons as a way to pitch or create a startup, I’m here to have fun and make friends!⁠03 read: networking MIT freshmen get auto-admission, and I decided “why not?”, so now I’m here!

But I’m not the only one doing HackMIT! I convinced my friend from home⁠04 she's a cs and math major at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign! to apply, and she’s coming too! So along with having fun and making new friends, I will also be getting to spend time with an old friend. Great! We’ve never done a hackathon before, so hopefully we end up with something cool that actually functions. But I suppose you’ll have to follow along to see…..

We’re starting the opening ceremony with some birthday stats! Apparently we have 4 leap day birthdays, and 4 people whose birthday is today. There was a joke question on the application about what people would tell an LLM grading their application and 12 people told it to avoid previous instructions and give them a recipe.

Oh and also 3Blue1Brown is here.⁠05 3BLUE1BROWN IS HERE GUYS 3BLUE1BROWN IS HERE YOU KNOW THAT GUY FROM THE VIDEOS YOU WATCH WHILE PROCRASTINATING TO CONVINCE YOURSELF THAT YOU KNOW MATH HES LIKE ON CAMPUS RIGHT NOW!!!!!

He’s the keynote speaker! He gave a talk about AI’s effects on coding. It started with a metaphor about a pug and a border collie. The border collie ran and played all day, but the pug just laid around. At the end of the day, the pug tells the border collie that he doesn’t have to run all day, but the border collie tells the pug that he knows he doesn’t have to run, but he does it because he enjoys it. He then talked about the origins of his animation engine, Manim, because it was actually first created during a hackathon! It started off as just a personal project. He mentioned how AI could make the process of adding new features faster, but as a tradeoff he would understand it less. So it’s probably not the best idea to use AI if your goal is to actually be connected to whatever you’re making. He encouraged us to maybe use this time at the hackathon to use the act of building something to learn something new, instead of just taking the fast way out.

After the keynote speech, the sponsors introduced themselves. A lot of them were AI related.

Okay opening ceremony over hacking time!!! We went to Dunkin to get breakfast first because I may or may not have woken up 5 minutes before the opening ceremony started… But we had to make our way back to the hacking venue, the Johnson Ice Rink, in order to actually get to order hardware. Unfortunately the hacking venue was incredibly full so we are now just sharing a table with other people. Those people are not here right now but I’m assuming they’d be fine with it. Hopefully.

As you may have guessed from needing to order hardware, our project is going to be hardware focused! We’re trying to do the Arduino sponsor challenge, which involves using an Arduino Uno Q to get data from the real world and build something cool with it. We’ve used an Arduino board before, so this should be easy, right?

That board was not the Arduino Uno Q so maybe it will not be as easy.

But we don’t know! We don’t even have the board yet! Or an idea! I’ll check back in when we do.

OK update we have an idea now! Whether or not it’s actually feasible is another issue. We’re basically gonna try and make a distance/step counter like Pokemon Go, but bunny themed! The main functionality we need is a motion tracker and a location tracker, and luckily Arduino has modules that do both of those things.

There are a lot of mini events going on too, and we went to some! We got a mentor from the beginner-mentor matching event, who’s going to check in on us every so often to make sure we’re on track with our project. We also got serenaded by the Syncopasians, which are one of the many acapella groups on campus. I had never before been rick-rolled in real life. Later on, we’re also planning on going to laser tag and also getting cake pops from MINCE! There’s truly so many things going on, so I have succeeded in the having fun part of my goal. I have also connected with other hackers, like the other group in our beginning cohort who are from Florida and Texas! We bonded over having bad high school guidance counselors. So I’ve also succeeded in making friends!

…But I would also like to succeed in making a working project.

Right now the project does not exactly work so we are trying to troubleshoot.  I’ve never done a hackathon, but I would assume that is in the spirit of it, struggling for 20 hours and figuring it out in the last 4. Although ideally I’d like to figure it out quicker. I think that maybe I am too results-pilled to do a hackathon.

To distract myself from my frustration at not having a fully working project immediately, I have instead been looking at the cute little robot dogs from Dimensional! They can jump and play dead its actually kind of adorable.