HACKmates: Journal Your Journey, Find Your Crew

✨ Inspiration

Hackathons are intense, chaotic, and exhilarating. I wanted a way to both document the journey and find teammates more easily. That inspired HACKmates: a hybrid platform where participants can narrate their hackathon story while discovering collaborators with complementary skills.

The idea came from blending two needs:

• Journaling the grind (to showcase progress and reflect later).
• Matchmaking for teammates (to avoid hacking alone).

📚 What I Learned

• How natural language can drive full‑stack app creation with MeDo.
• The importance of user experience design in hackathon tools.
• That collaboration isn’t just about skills; it’s about shared experiences and energy.

🛠 How I Built It

1. Defined Requirements: Created a document outlining the pages, features I wanted, and the logic.
   
2. Prompted MeDo: Used natural language to scaffold journal entry pages, collab finder, and hybrid feed.
   
3. Integrated APIs: Added Discord for communication and optional GitHub for project updates.
   
4. Deployed: Leveraged MeDo’s one‑click deploy to generate a public showcase URL.
   

⚡ Challenges Faced

• Balancing journal + collab: Making sure neither feature overshadowed the other.
  
• Time pressure: Hackathons move fast, so I focused on core flows first (journal entries + collab posts).
  
• UI consistency: Choosing fonts and color schemes that felt both “hackathon‑techy” and “community‑friendly.”
  

👉 HACKmates is more than an app — it’s a way to turn hackathon chaos into a story worth following and a team worth joining.

Built With

• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• react