The Birthday Show

It's your birthay! Celebrate with a presentation made by all of your friends!
Sing along to Happy Birthday!
It looks like I got a present! What could it be?
A gift card? POGGERS
I love frogs!
You don't have to send a gift - plain messages are just as good for making someone's birthday better!

Inspiration

Birthdays are an important milestone for everyone. You get to hang out and go wild with your closest friends and family. You get to eat some very nice food to commemorate. And for one day, everyone you know just seems to like you and be happy. It's no surprise that we often throw large birthday parties to celebrate this once-in-a-year moment.

But the pandemic heavily changed that. Since we can't leave our homes, birthday have essentially just become "normal days" for us again, with the occasional "Happy Birthday" DM.

Yesterday, I turned 22, and as I expected, I was nowhere near as excited as I was one year ago. Normally, I would be celebrating with my close group of friends, but I instead spent much of my time sleeping, running errands, and doing work. Birthdays weren't "fun" anymore, since the pandemic has heavily strained any sort of social interaction.

So how can I make my birthday enjoyable again, and give it a huge upgrade from just sending two words over a short message? How can I make it fun and easy for people to give heartfelt messages again?

What it does

The Birthday Show is a web app that allows groups of friends to easily and collaboratively create a presentation to make someone's birthday extra special. It's a lot like those YouTube montages you see (for example, this one), but fully automated.

Each individual person can upload a personal birthday video, along with their digital presents. Once everyone has uploaded their individual parts and it's time to present the animation, a link to a pre-made slideshow can be sent over to the birthday person for them to watch. The show begins with a sing-along "Happy Birthday" (where ideally, everyone would pre-record themselves singing), followed by a short introductory message, followed by friend-submitted personal messages with gifts timed to when they introduce it in the video. The show ends with a list of the gifts again, and if applicable, the gift can be clicked to be redeemed.

In the app's current state, you can only view a finished birthday show. The app is currently hard-coded to show videos that I have been sent for my own birthday, so you only get to see the end result - the infrastructure for building that end result unfortunately isn't in place.

You can view the app here. This serves as my “video” demo.

How I built it

This app was built on the Next JS stack and deployed to Vercel. This app also uses GCP for video storage, though I may not have the time to get to this.

Challenges I ran into

Not having enough time. I started this project around 12 AM PST on Sunday 2/7, since I was mentoring and celebrating my birthday with family. The project idea seemed simple enough to do in the short amount of time, but things quickly turned out to be more time-consuming that I had originally thought, and my tiredness didn't help either. So the lesson is: don't condense an 36 hour hackathon into 8 hours :)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I got to take this opportunity to reach out to a bunch of my close friends again :) I didn't think I would get so many friends who were willing to send in birthday videos for me. I couldn't show them all, because I wanted to keep it short for judging and because some of the videos contained private info. I'm thankful to all of them for sticking around even though we haven't seen each other in almost a year.

I really did just hack my birthday to make it better :)

What I learned

Don't start a hackathon project 8 hours before it's due, especially if you're doing it alone and half-asleep. Also reach out to your friends - it's hard for people to reach out to one another during the pandemic, and you might just make someone's day by doing so.

What's next for The Birthday Show

Finish all the features that I didn't get to, which include:

Ability to create new birthday shows and send personalized links to others
Ability for people to upload videos - I had to hard code them for this demo
Ability to upload digital gift cards directly into the website
Ability to sing "Happy Birthday" as a group - every person would sing Happy Birthday individually (using the same live lyrics in the beginning of my animation), and the server would stitch them all together.