Built a fully functional backend with a lame-ass frontend in 24 hours on 2 hours of sleep — proof that delirium is just accelerated creativity.
Every bug I fixed uncovered two more, pretty sure I’ve accidentally implemented mitosis in my software.
Commit #0 – The Overconfidence Push
When I signed up for this hackathon, I thought:
“We’ll keep it simple. Maybe a small web app, nice UI, minimal features. Easy win.”
Two hours in, “keep it simple” turned into designing a backend that could probably run half the internet.
Commit #5 – The All-Nighter Debug Session
Backend issues hit us like a freight train.
We spent the whole night wrestling with API endpoints that just wouldn’t behave.
One of my teammates had been stuck on a single bug for two hours straight.
Five cups of tea later, I swooped in and fixed it in just 15 minutes.
Right after that victory, a third person (not the poor guy stuck on the bug) casually dropped this gem:
“I helped you clear the 1st round. 2nd round is up to you guys.”
Which, translated from Hackathon-ese, basically means:
“I’m done, you’re on your own now.”
Commit #12 – Backend Nirvana, Frontend Tragedy
The backend was glorious fast, secure, and rock solid.
The frontend? Looked like it was made by someone’s pet hamster walking on a keyboard.
We knew the imbalance was bad, but fixing the frontend felt like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with a broom at that point.
Commit #17 – The SE Reality Check
Before this hackathon, we thought Software Engineering was an “easy” subject. All the models looked the same in the notes boxes, arrows, and buzzwords.
Turns out, SE is the difference between a clean, focused project and a caffeine-fueled mess.
We lacked any real strategic planning no timelines, no role allocation, no clear architecture. Basically, we were building a house without a floor plan.
Commit #22 – The “We Already Lost” Hour
The final sixty minutes of the hackathon weren’t spent frantically coding, debugging, or racing to add features.
They were spent scrolling Instagram Reels, a silent, collective acknowledgment that our fate was sealed.
It wasn’t that our backend wasn’t good. No, it was critical-level flawless.
Every API endpoint was optimized to the point of smugness, database queries executed with the speed of a caffeine-fueled squirrel, and the architecture was so clean it could’ve been in a textbook.
But here’s the truth no one says out loud: in most hackathons, a perfect backend is like a genius hiding behind a curtain.
The judges rarely peek. They’re looking for flash, something shiny to click, swipe, or tap in the demo.
If your masterpiece lives behind the scenes, you might as well have built a particle accelerator in your garage. Impressive, sure… but if you can’t wrap it in pastel colors and rounded buttons, it’s invisible.
Our assigned “guides” and I use that term generously, were essentially interns armed with a laminated cheat sheet.
They nodded in predictable intervals, delivering pre-approved motivational lines like NPCs in a badly written RPG.
If mentorship was supposed to be part of the hackathon experience, ours felt more like watching a YouTube tutorial in 144p, all filler, no insight.
By that last hour, stress gave way to a kind of zen resignation.
We weren’t going to slap together a panic-UI just to score points.
If we were going to lose, we’d lose with the backend untouched, a perfectly functional monument to code quality that no one in the judging room would truly appreciate.
It wasn’t that our backend wasn’t good. No, it was architecturally unassailable, engineered by our backend guy who was operating on a completely different plane of existence.
While the rest of us were still trying to remember which API did what, he was casually orchestrating database schemas like a symphony conductor.
Endpoints were not just functional — they were elegant, almost poetic in how they handled requests.
He wrote queries so efficient they could probably return results from a database that hadn’t even been created yet.
By the time he was done, the backend wasn’t just working — it felt alive, self-aware, and possibly judging our frontend for not living up to its standards.
If hackathons had a “Backend Hall of Fame,” this would have been inducted on day one, behind velvet ropes, with a sign saying “Do Not Touch — It Just Works.”
Postmortem
Hackathons sell themselves as innovation incubators, but more often, they’re presentation contests wearing hoodies.
The scoreboard doesn’t care if your backend could survive a DDoS attack from the gods themselves. If the judges can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
And that’s the irony: the very events that are supposed to celebrate building great software often reward building great-looking software.
It’s a reminder that, in tech (and life), substance matters, but presentation decides the prize.
So yes, we walked away without a trophy, but we also walked away with the most bulletproof backend of the entire event.
And in the unspoken world of developers, that’s worth far more than a laminated “Winner” certificate signed by three people who couldn’t tell JSON from XML.
