The Nerd's Definition of Fun

Everyone likes to have fun in their own unique ways. Some people enjoy playing football, some need a pint of beer, some cook for fun. And still there is one thing a true nerd loves doing the most: hacking or simply coding in his free time.

And you know what's the best place for side hustling, hacking and coding? Heck yeaaah, it's a good old hackathon. Hackathon with its true meaning, to build smthing cool and nerdy for fun.

Problem is, hackathons don't happen around us every weekend. So should a nerd just sit and wait until someone finally organises one? Hell nooo :)

Let me suggest a crazy, yet simple way out of this: just book any upcoming weekend and call it your personal hackathon.

But wait, what does a personal hackathon even mean? ooo god, this guy is writing some crazy things again, who even reads this piece of ...? :)))

Anyways, let me share my very recent experience with my personal single day "hackathon".

2 weeks ago I honestly got a bit depressed and exhausted with the work week, so on friday I decided to organise a 1 day solo hackathon for myself.

The rules were simple. Mute every notification, lock in for a full day and ship a fully functional product by the end of it. Not a demo, not a half-built repo, but a real thing people would actually use.

So on saturday morning, july 18th, I got to my laptop, muted everything just like the rules said and my solo hackathon was on :))

Of course I had no idea what to build and coming up with the proper idea, turned out to be my first hackathon challenge.

Good for me, next day was the argentina vs spain world cup final, so it got pretty obvious that whatever I build should somehow connect with that hype. Then my inner voice reminded me of another hackathon rule: you don't build things you are already expert in, you try something completely new. And well it turned out that after 10 years in software engineering I had never built a single game at allll.

So the plan was clear: some simple web based game, super engaging and deliverable in 1 day(as the final's hype would literally end on the next day). After thinking and chatting with claude for about an hour, Messi vs Yamal was born.

The idea is simple. You choose your hero, Messi or Yamal and then you just tap the screen as aggressively as you can, each tap adding 1 point to your side's counter. It's the whole Yamal team against the whole Messi team, tapping like crazy to see who wins before the final kicks off.

With all the visuals and game logic it took me 5-6 hours to finalize. And boom, later that day messiyamal.com was launched. I shared it on my linkedin and ig stories and guess what? people started tapping :)))

Even after the world cup final I saw the tap scores increasing. Today we have over 70,000 taps from 150 unique users :)) and it still keeps growing even after 2 weeks from the final.

So the friday requirement was met: real product, real users, real taps. I came up with the idea that morning, had super fun building it and then got actual engagement from real people. That was the true WIN part of my hackathon.

Long story long(cause if you got here, this essay can't be considered as a short story :))))) I encourage all of you to organise personal hackathons, either alone or with your co-builders. That second option's even better tbh, my cofounder just happened to be busy that day so I went solo :)) Just lock in for a day, ignore everything else and have fun building something cool.

Lastly I love how Shopify's founder Tobi frames it in his twitter bio:

Shopify CEO by day, Dad in evening, hacker at night, Aspiring comprehensivist.

No matter how busy you are during the day, a true nerd can alway find time to hack and tinker at night.

So go book that weekend and hack the sh*t out of it, LFG :))