Noah Nguyen's Blog

I'm just gonna dump my brains into this blog entry. A lot has transpired over the 6 days from the last time I was on this blog.

We lost the WINFO Hackathon.

I don't know how, I don't know why, but we lost. Well I do know why, but I'll get to that in a second. We had 9 hours to create a high-fidelity prototype to show to a panel of mentors and judges for the Best-Impact track of the WINFO Hackathon. Me, Andy, Caprice, and Sidiq had been preparing ideas, features, and outlining what we were gonna do on Saturday a week in advance, imagining new ideas and refining features that we were going to implement. When preparation meets opportunity brings luck my ass. We were prepared, the table across from us didn't even have an idea for their project until it was time to work.

Sidiq manhandled the web-application. One man, one Cursor agent, a laptop versus the world, and he won. He created a working real-time map using the mapbox API (which sucks and pales in comparison to Google Maps), Firebase for user reports, and a bunch of React that I don't even know how to read. He bought the domain melttheice.us and we shipped a live ICE Tracker in the 9 hour window. We also designed a high-fidelity iOS prototype in Figma which was pretty cool, Caprice taught me and Andy how to use Figma and I picked it up pretty fast. I see a bright future in that for me. NOT.

The entire time, looking at the tables around us, surely there was no way that any team would have both an implementation and also Figma prototype of their product. We were right. Nobody had both, clearly we were going to be finalists, right? There happened to be 3 other ICE Trackers around us, all striving to be the top candidate for the Best Impact track. Throughout 4 mentoring rounds, where industry professionals from Adobe, Microsoft, and Figma were walking around asking questions to teams about their product, we recieved nothing but constructive criticism and high praise for our commitment to creating a tangible, working application on top of our prototype.

It's about 6:50pm, we have been programming for almost 9 hours and it's time to wrap up in 10 minutes. We submit our slide that has a links to our site, our prototype, and Github repo. Now we can finally stretch and take a much needed break, the hard part is done, now it's time to sit back and wait until we hear, "Congratulations Melt The Ice for reaching the final round.".

Those words never came. We look attentively at the projector, clapping for every finalist announced. It was almost like a sick punishment from God making Best Impact announced last. The announcer announces the 3 winners, and our product name never came out of her mouth. We. Lost. Our live real-time map web-application for tracking ICE agent activity lost to a high-fidelity wireframe on Figma of a ICE activity map. It was the same product, the only difference is that their non-functional prototype looked a lot better than ours. Did they ship a real MVP? No, they didn't. Does their product make immediate, real-world impact? No, it doesn't. Did they win? Yes, they did.

I admit I am salty, but tell me that logic doesn't sound backwards to you. All we can do now is live and learn from it. Oh well, woe is me. Me, Sidiq, Andy, and Zhorzh are going to keep working on melttheice.us and make it known to the entire United States.

It wasn't all for nothing though. I made a great LinkedIn post about the web-app, looks great on the resume, and got to learn Figma which was really intuitive and fun to use. My first hackathon ever I will say was a success despite not actually winning :/ . We were so confident in being finalists at least that we all set our Sundays aside for the judging. I hung out with my girl all day Sunday instead, pretty epic lol.

My 20th birthday is coming up hot! February 20 falls on a Friday and I already have the flyer made and invite list ready to be sent out! Isn't that crazy? 20th birthday on the 20th. That'll happen only once in your life. I'm thankful that my roommates will let me have the party in the house.

I ate Call a Chicken today and it felt like a xenomorph tearing my stomach from the inside. I'll attach an image here lol.

First ESEC meeting tomorrow, hopefully the guys are friendly and I'll meet some cool dudes and be able to work as an intern with Propper.ai or some shit like that. The internship is excruciating and sometimes I want to curl up into a ball and die. That's accepting defeat though, and I will never do that. I've come to far in my life and academic career to get to UW on a full-ride and throw it all away. I have to make the most of any opportunity I get. I won't stop, I never will.

Costco Ignite Your Career fair was dope. Went with Steven on a bus full of naive freshman chuds, eager to make any type of connection on LinkedIn they could, even the janitor. Reminds me of myself a year ago lmao. I met these really cool dudes, Branden, cybersecurity and privacy for Costco, Steven, head of all video for Costco, and Nick, head of Costco's central security station. I was really stoked on Nick's table though, all of this hardware that looked exactly like the PC I built this winter, and also a priority queue of alerts for Costco, which is what I learned about last week in Data Structures. I got all of their contacts and hope to turn those into some lifelong connections.

Long entry, I probably won't make another one of this length again for a while. This took 30 min to write, I'm stopping at 10:13pm. Bye.

Well Sidiq ended up getting on the WINFO team a week ago and decided not to let anybody know. I was stressing out for nothing LMAO. Me, Andy, Caprice, and Sidiq all met up today at Ode and discussed more implementation details of our ########## project. Details will not be shared.... Secrecy is of the utmost importance to preserve our hackathon winning idea.

Still waiting to hear back from ID Tech, emailed Lori but she is probably busy interviewing other people or some shit like that. I hope I get the job, my summer income to pay rent is banking on this job lowkey.

I am gonna work on the styling of the blog a little tonight, plans are to finally make the nav bar, change background color and text color, push the footer down to bottom of page, add boxes for entries stuff like that. Bye bye.

Today I made some great chicken and pancakes with my buddy Aiden Yip. It was gonna be chicken and waffles but the waffle maker press thing that he brought didn't work. It started around like 10:00AM where we had to go to Safeway to get chicken and buttermilk for the brine. We didn't get all wrapped up with cooking and cleaning till like 2:30PM, so like 4.5 hours. I don't think I will be making fried chicken again lol.

I've been getting my ass kicked in my CSE312: foundations of computing II and CSE332: data structures classes and it's really not that awesome I don't know how to do anything else but put my head down and work so I will be continuing to do that. This upcoming weekend I have the WINFO Hackathon which will be my first hackathon ever. If Sidiq doesn't get on the team we will literally lose, and if he does get on the team we will most assuredly win. Fingers crossed.

Another thing on my mind is this ID Tech Summer Instructor job. I really did put in a lot of work in my application rounds, all 3 of them! I spent a good hour writing up my application and response questions, spent a few hours putting together what I think is a great 8-minute teaching instruction demo, and spent 2 nights doing mock ID Tech interviews with my girl. I thought the real innterview in the 3rd round went good, definitely not bad! She said that it would take like 2 weeks for me to hear back about a decision, and my interview was on 01/06/26 soo tomorrow is when I'll email Lori (interviewer) and find out if I get the job..........

Anyway, that's it for now, I'll work on the HTML nav bar and CSS shit later, I'm too swamped with life and school to worry about this blog :/

I did a ton of stuff today. Including making this webpage.