📌 Introduction

This summer (summer of 2025), I had a long two months break, and thought that I wanted to do something new and exciting. That’s what made me want to participate in my first hackathon. Although I was nervous before the start of the hackathon, overall, it was a fun and interesting experience.

🌱 Beginning

I should first tell you how I got to find out the event, how I formed a team, and how our team brainstormed together before the start of the hackathon. I wanted to join a hackathon that was designed for my age group (high school), since I didn’t want to compete with adults. After some research, I found a website that showed all the upcoming high school hackathon events, and I chose to participate in a hackathon called Hack with the Beat.

This hackathon was a music-themed hackathon and encouraged the participants to create projects linked to music. Since the schedule fit well for me, and it seemed to be a good hackathon (based on the website and the Discord server), I chose to give it a try.
I wasn’t brave enough to join a hackathon by myself, so I chose to form a group. Forming the group was pretty easy as there was a place in the Discord server where we could find teammates and join groups. I was able to form a group with three other people. We divided our main roles (I was in charge of ML and backend), and our team started to brainstorm our ideas. We had lots of different ideas such as a music visualizer and a weather-based playlist, but we chose to stick with a mood playlist generator, which was to create a website that created playlists based on the user’s feelings.

🛠️ Building Phase

The hackathon had officially started, and we began to work on our own parts. Although I made some small changes to the frontend, I mainly worked on the backend, especially the emotion detector and the LLM. If you’re interested in how exactly I implemented this, I encourage you to watch this video which explains how the website works and also shows a demo:

One of the moments that I remember the most during the hackathon was when I was finally able to find a way to use an LLM that was good enough. Since I hadn’t used LLM APIs before, it was pretty difficult to suitable API, but I remember being super happy after seeing the LLM respond when I used OpenRouter.
Since we had more people in one team than others, we wanted to make our project as high quality as possible. So, we also spent some time on things other than coding. One example is the YouTube Shorts I uploaded.
After finally finding a suitable LLM API after hours of struggle, I was very exhausted, and I needed a break. But not doing anything for the project made me kind of guilty. So, after finding out that there was a Most Viral Project award, I created a video showing a prototype of our project. Although I was a bit shy at first, it turned out to be worth it as we were able to get 1st place for that award.

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JjUGuGoRDos

🤝 The People

I want to thank all my teammates Christa, Nandhu, and Aahana for their hard work on this project! Although we were all in different time zones, I think we collaborated pretty well. I also want to thank the organizers and judges for their time and effort.

⏰ Final Stretch

The hackathon was hosted in the US, and the submission time was Sunday 12 PM EDT, which was 6 AM in Poland (where I live currently), and since I’m the type of person who always gets nervous in tests and other competitions, I couldn’t sleep well and just chose to check if my teammates living in the US submitted the project well by waking up at 5 AM. It was only after we submitted that I was able to sleep again.

🏆 Results

Although the results were supposed to come out in two weeks, it actually took two months! It was so late that I actually forgot that the results would come out.
Here are the awards that we got:
🥈 Best Overall Hack - 2nd
🥉 Most Business Potential - 3rd
🥇 Most Viral Project - 1st
Although I was kind of expecting to get the Most Viral Project award since I was able to look up other teams’ posts on social media, I wasn’t expecting to get Best Overall Hack and Most Business Potential! I was especially proud of the Best Overall Hack award.

💭 Looking Back

Looking back, I think that this hackathon was a memorable experience that made my summer more exciting. Although I haven’t joined any other hackathons since then, I’m thinking about joining another during the winter break. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next blog post!