Hackathons

"This was my first Lion City Hacks and honestly the first time I felt old in a hackathon — most of the room were literal kids spending the whole day coding, full of vigour and enthusiasm. So we deliberately chose to design something that would resonate with that crowd: a gamified, fun take on a wrist-pain remedy, instead of the usual serious enterprise pitch. Winning Most Entertaining Project from the attendees told us we'd hit the brief — broadening horizons and grabbing the attention of younger developers, not just impressing judges."

"Doubling down on HearAll across hackathons was the decision. Each event became another iteration loop — T4G 2022 gave the product its first contact with real users, iNTUition proved we could harden it under pressure, so Create4Good was for closing the loop: prove people actually wanted it, with numbers. Running the same product through back-to-back briefs is a real founder muscle — the idea, judges, and time budget all change, but the thesis has to keep holding."

"Bringing HearAll back into a 24-hour sprint was a deliberate constraint. Instead of starting fresh, the brief became 'take what the assistive-tech community told you at T4G and ship the next version by tomorrow afternoon.' 24 hours is too short to design a brand from scratch; it's the right length to prove a single iteration of an existing one."

"T4G was the genesis. Picking an assistive-tech showcase as HearAll's first outing wasn't accidental — building accessibility tech for a room full of judges teaches you to demo, but building it for the actual community teaches you whether the product is real. Their feedback — what they tolerated, what they discarded, what survived contact with daily use — set the roadmap for every hackathon iteration after this one."

"CityHack was about building for the built environment — solving an actual urban problem with engineers from the firm looking over your shoulder. Designing against real infrastructure and sustainability constraints, not just a demo, was a different kind of pressure than a student hackathon."

"ITI was where I deliberately stepped back from 'build a feature' and into 'design a workplace.' Choosing this event was a decision to widen the HearAll mission: real inclusion needs more than an app, it needs the surrounding processes. Defending an idea in front of people who live the problem is the cheapest reality check a builder can get — and it reframed what kind of product HearAll should grow into."

"MXHacks pushed me out of my usual stack and onto a low-code platform. Picking a logistics admin dashboard as the build was a deliberate choice — the domain has obvious enterprise value and the data model is messy enough that low-code's strengths (forms, tables, workflows) actually shine. Shipping something real on a tool you've just picked up, against the clock, is a fast lesson in focusing on the problem instead of the tooling."