Janice, Roius, Gwyn, and I entered PayHack 2024 as four mathematics students from UTAR. Only two of us had tried a hackathon; Gwyn had never written code. None of us had much web development experience.
We made the Top 32 from almost 100 teams. Then we had four days to learn enough Vue.js and Flask to build a prototype while juggling internships. Janice travelled from JB to KL for it.
The idea and the questions we hadn’t answered
Our idea estimated carbon footprints from transaction data and explored pooling the savings for trading.
Johan Nasir’s mentoring sessions felt like a rotan session. “What happens if the carbon credits are manipulated?” “How do you ensure the authenticity of the footprint data?” Each question sent us back to the assumptions behind the demo.
Keeping the demo alive
We worked through tutorials after our internships. At the hackathon, we took turns sleeping. I couldn’t get a tent, so I used a bench for four-hour naps.
At 8:30 AM on submission day, 90 minutes before the deadline, our backend crashed while parsing information. We hardcoded some components to submit by 10 AM.
The pitch
We didn’t make the Top 10. A blockchain remittance team stood out because they had researched regulation and validated their market as carefully as they had built the product.
The stronger pitches connected features to business problems, survived the demo pressure, and answered questions with numbers. Next time, I wanted to validate the market earlier and practise the pitch more.
I did win a Samsung monitor in the lucky draw. That gave our tired team something to laugh about.
Janice, Roius, and Gwyn took the risk with me. Johan kept asking the questions we wanted to avoid. PayNet and JomHack gave us a place to build and test an idea outside the classroom.