I just finished my first Mint Bean hackathon! I'm so excited, this was my first opportunity to attend a hackathon, so far I have done GiveCamp Memphis that is also an intensive weekend challenge to help non-profits, but not a hackathon. I have heard about how participating in one could be a great opportunity to improve, engage, and network, so I attended to see how it was and I liked the idea a lot.

After listening for a while I said "I have to do this" (I love challenges), I wasn't really sure if the time frame would be something that I could meet due to having long workdays, but I was convinced that I needed to at least try.

Soon after the meeting, members in my closest community started talking about it and I posted looking for partners to work in this and Will reached out. We meet via Zoom the night after the hackathon started so we already were 1 day behind, but we talked about goals and expectations for this challenge, and even knowing that we were in different time zones we were on the same page, and we said "let's do this" and started working right after the meeting.

The hardest part for me was to balance my work, family activities, studies, and the project; sometimes it's hard when you have more responsibilities and your family depending and counting on you but, that is when the commitment and goals come into play. Thankfully I managed to make it happen of course with my family's support.

Being this the first time for me managing a Github project and for Will to be in a development team was a great experience, even when we thought at times things were not right after some errors, but we got to figure things out. Every night we meet shared progress, set to-do's, encouraged each other, and plan for the next day.

This was for sure a stressful and absolutely fun week of challenges, fixing errors, lots of thinking, meetings, long nights, and pretty early days. At the beginning of the challenge, we said, "Okay, let's try to make it on time, and if for some reason we can't, no problem we would still have a team project to finish and improve", but two days later we saw what we had so far and we realized that we were making it happen and we went all-in with this project.

The night after the deadline, we were almost ready and trying to fix something our game logic broke, and for some reason, those hours fixing that looked like forever until we finally got it working as we wanted to, and there we were deploying and submitting our project five days and a half after not knowing if we could make it on time but, we did it.

I can personally say that I couldn't be happier with this experience, it's been great to meet new people, to have the satisfaction of completing this project, and mostly to work within a team with someone that I didn't know before.

I'm already looking forward to future projects, challenges, meet new fellow developers, progress in my Front-end development career, and job to come.

I hope to meet you in this journey!`,