Hey y'all! I'm Edmund, a senior in college who loves 1800s history, self-hypnosis, and mafia (the social deduction game). I started this blog to:
Do my future self a favor so he can look back on this time in my life.
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Blog 32 - The Smartest Place I’ve Been
“Genius is nothing more than childhood recaptured at will.” -Charles Baudelaire
It's different, this blog from the rest. Not because something crazy happened, but I have no notes to go off. Usually when I travel and I'm thinking of what I want to remember, I jot down bullets in my notes app. When I sit down to write, I've already figured out 80% of the blog.
However, this has no script. All I have to describe what happened this weekend is 400 something photos from a Nikon camera I'm required to use for a class at Yale. While for previous blogs I'd just elaborate on bullet notes, now I'm spurring my five senses through an Adobe Lightroom album.
One of my biggest insecurities is that I have a terrible memory. When I write journals, I don't think about what happened during the day, but how I feel in the moment. When I'm asked what I ate for dinner two days ago, I'm frozen in place. In fact, that's part of why I started writing these blogs, to ensure no memory would get lost in the depth of experience. To my mind, so much is happening in the present that it's best to take quick photos and write little notes, focusing more on the now.
As we speak, I'm sitting in the San Francisco airport right next to Kanhai, my accountability partner in crime. I just told him if I don't write four paragraphs in the next thirty minutes, I owe charity $50. Well, that's a win-win. So let's go over what happened this weekend:
What is a hackathon?
This weekend, I was at TreeHacks, the world's best hackathon based at Stanford University. What's a hackathon? It's an event where hackers, coders, makers from all over the world meet and work for 36 hours straight on a startup idea. Like think of 2,000 of the world's smartest college students in one huge room, coding on their computers at marathon pace. Empty chip bags, messy cables, and tipped over Red Bull cans line the tables, while every now and then you see someone wearing an Apple Vision Pro.
And boy, was it an environment to experience. Coming in without any coding experience, I still remember a sort of intimidation walking up to the sign-in table - the intimidation that I didn't belong. It's a feeling I've conquered many times, but man, the fact that I was probably the only kid in the room who didn't know how to code had me feeling immobile. This immobility was good in that since I signed in a few hours early, I used two hours to finish my homework for the weekend (A cool reading response about Hiram Bingham, the Yalie who discovered Machu Picchu). Then, I just remember looking around at all the coders meeting each other, talking to sponsors, and above all, smiling. "What a blessing, to test that ability to feel like we belong," I thought as I wrapped my camera strap around me.
I've mentioned before that my demeanor changes by the language I speak, and having the camera was no different. Now I had this tool to experiment with, using the hackathon as a super cool and novel subject. For example, a few times I found hackers who clearly were only a couple minutes into meeting. Knowing that they didn't know each other well, I went up and would say "Guys, picture!" knowing that they'd wrap their arms around each other while posing. I think we can all agree that physical contact strengthens relationships, so to make that picture an "excuse" for those strangers to bond even more was the coolest freaking thing ever. I did this a couple times at Feb Club (30 day long party for Yale seniors), and hope to do it even more. I don't think I'd do photography as a profession, but damn, it felt amazing to bring these strangers together.
Not only this, it felt like such an honor to be in this environment. Throughout the 36 hours, I saw teams code at lightning speed, bounce ideas off each other at 200 miles an hour, and ultimately present their projects with such passion in their eyes. It was inspiring. With that being said, here's three stories I wanna tell from this crazy, fun, just plain dream of a weekend.
The Tensest Environment I've Ever Experienced
Seriously. And this comes from someone who's been robbed and extorted.
It's Friday, and hacking just started. Me and Paul see an announcement that says: "Q&A with CEO of X company - best question gets an Apple Vision Pro!" Paul and I rush to the classroom where it's happening, which is filling up.
The whole event is 30 minutes, and not only 15 minutes into the CEO's introduction about his background, a hand shoots up from this kid in the back. He asks his question - it has substance in it, it's specific - but there's so much nervousness in his voice, to the point it's so clear that he just wants to ask a good question for the Vision Pro. I mean, who can blame him? This is his one shot.
Then, a few hands shoot up. Then ten, fifteen hands. Even the first asker raises his hand again. It's a bloody Mexican standoff.
One by one I notice the subtleties of stress in the kids with their hands raised. Different clues of stress. The red hoodie in the corner, he's sitting up perfectly straight with a stoic expression, yet his trembling left eyebrow gives away his anxiety. The kid in front of me, his side temple and back of his cheek are pulsing red like a volcano about to erupt. And most obvious, nearly everyone's hands are shaking while extended in the air.
I'm sitting back crossing my arms and my legs, just in awe. The elephant isn't confined to the room anymore, it's outgrown it and has crushed the walls and ceiling. I can't believe what I'm seeing. I've been in rooms where people's motivations have been so opposite to their actions, but never on this level of groupthink. Everyone has that perfect question in their heads that they're hoping will win them the trendiest gadget in the world right now.
I take a second and feel, absorb the stuffiness and tenseness lurking in the air. It’s a familiar ambiance to the one that hits me as soon as I walk into the Yale Underground - a study room/coffee shop where stress seems to ooze out of students’ skins.
The guy who ultimately won had a crazy look of relief in his eyes when he was shouted out. It was even more hilarious when the moderator called time and not only did everyone's hands go down, everyone walked out the room. Not a single person actually wanted to ask the CEO anything.
Laughing Yoga
When I read "Laughing Yoga Workshop" in the hackathon schedule, I thought it would be just some funny poses. I flashbacked to when I was laughing my ass off in Colombia with Rebecca while doing the "Happy Baby" pose and clapping my feet together. I wasn’t expecting what followed.
We're a circle of six, and the host starts us off with "Laughter Namaste". He explains that all you do is bow with hands in a praying position, but every time you do it you just laugh. He begins bowing up and down, howling laugh after laugh. And watching it, it's so ridiculous that I do it and I start laughing my ass off. Soon enough, our entire group of six is laughing at the absolute absurdity of praying to each other while forcing laughter out.
Another exercise had us name things making us stressed like tests, applications, etc. and putting them in a metaphorical box. We then put this "stress box" on the ground and smashed it with a huge laughing hammer - we had to laugh every time we swung the hammer. You can probably imagine how crazy it looks.
I'm chuckling reminiscing on the stupidity of laughter yoga. Can't wait for next time.
My Favorite Hacks
Ah, yes, the marquee event of the weekend: The presentation of the projects. It's like a science fair where you walk around and talk to groups about what they've spent the last 36 hours on. Armed with my trusty camera, I walked up to stand after stand to hear their pitches. My favorite three ideas were:
Chime - a language learning app
Chime was the perfect example of what I appreciate: An impactful app by an enthusiastic team. You talk to an AI bot through your microphone and simulate practical scenarios - a hospital visit, a job interview, etc. It's especially valuable for immigrants trying to learn English and assimilate in America. The AI's responses strike a cool balance between being conversational and formal to ensure you learn the right amount of vocab. I actually tried their demo with French and it was super spot on - it pointed out every grammatical error I made with precision. It even has an Apple Watch widget where if you for example walk into a library, it'll quiz you on what "library" is in the language you're learning.
What really sold me was the team behind it. They were easily the most energetic, attentive, and emotionally intelligent team I talked to throughout my tour. I could tell in their complexions that they were ready for any question, and were focused on making me, their listener, comfortable with their presentation of the app. Love it.
Message Minder
I liked this because of how real the problem it's solving is. It's this iMessage widget that gets rid of your bad texting problem. It studies your text history through an AI model to figure out your texting style. When you have to answer someone, it generates three possible responses in the style that you text.
For example, Lillian asks, "Can you help me with my homework?" You can choose between: "Sorry can't really help with homework right now. Got my own stuff to do." or "Sorry can't rn got my own work gotta do hope u understand talk l8r".
At first glance, the idea is ridiculous. Who's ever going to let an AI text for them? But given the current state in our generation, where it's too much "mental energy" to send even a text, maybe Message Minder is our golden star. I have literally met people who are proud of being so "busy" they can't respond to messages. It's the new "bragging you got four hours of sleep".
Recollect
My favorite hack of all was Recollect, this robotic arm that flips book pages and automatically scans them for important info. They had this really cool demo that showed the robot at work, flipping pages of a used middle school journal (I find it hard to believe that a middle school journal had scribbled calculus in it, but hey we're at Stanford).
This is super significant because so many historical papers and reports are “lost” because they aren't digitized - it's a lot of work to do manually! So the more robotic arms out there to flip pages, the better access we'll have to documents in the future. This tool actually exists already in many university libraries, including Yale's DHL. However, these machines cost tens of thousands of dollars. The prototype I witnessed? $150!
More important than any of this, I got to have fun with Kanhai, Paul, Cam, Maya, and Hannah which was super fulfilling and fun. Nuff said.
So much has happened in the last two weeks. Feeling at peace at Yale, Mardi Gras (this necessitates another blog), and now TreeHacks. As I'm writing this, I'm on the red eye from San Francisco to New York, fighting back the urge to close my eyes. Ciao for now…
Edmund