Why I Love Hack This Fall 2.0?

Hi everyone, let me introduce myself.

I'm Bailey Luu, a 3rd year Computer Security student at York University. I am a Hackathon Evangelist at Hack This Fall. ElleHacks was my first hackathon in Feb 2020 and I had no experience of any tech stack except Java. One of our teammates have experience in Figma and that's how I know a new tech stack. Fast forward to the present, I become more active in hackathon community after I joined Blahajgang in Local Hack Day: Build and Local Hack Day: Share, hosted by Major League Hacking.

I have opportunities to complete daily challenges with my friends, team up for the future hackathons and learn about Firebase and Google Cloud Platform. The reasons I tell you all of these because I want to emphasize that community is the best place for you to grow and make new connections with people from around the world. I would like to talk about Hack This Fall and why I love about it.

Hack This Fall is a 48 Hours Virtual Hackathon where we aim to promote hackers and help them nurture their new ideas and prototypes in various domains. Our motto, "Innovate For Good", is to involve more beginner hackers and support everyone to solve the shared problems of our society to bring a change in a revolutionary way.

For season 2, we are focusing on creating more learning opportunities along with building and solving. We will talk about various technologies, create awareness, encourage others, hack to contribute, and participate in many more exciting events & session. - HTF

For every Wednesday at 11:30 AM ET | 9 PM IST, @hackthisfalldev hosts #HTFConnect on HTF's discord for hackers to learn, network, and share.

What people learnt at HTFConnect 🤝

First HTFConnect!

We got to introduce ourself and meet new people from around the world! One thing that Hack This Fall makes me excited about is the diversity. I get to learn people from Malawi, Vadodara, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and many more.

Second HTFConnect!

One of the discussions were about how people feel towards LinkedIn such as feeling stressful when someone post about swags or achievements. People are facing imposter syndrome, doubting their own abilities. Although LinkedIn helps people to find jobs but it has side effects. After I listened to people's perspective towards LinkedIn, it gave me an idea for Hackathon project. During Build a Modern Data App hackathon hosted by AngelHack and DataStax, our team built a website called LetsShill that allows people to share their projects and learn from getting feedbacks from others. Since LinkedIn is a professional website, it doesn't give people who are beginner an opportunity to show off their projects. LetsShill allows people from different experience levels to show their projects publicly. You can view our project on Replit, we still need to add additional feature. If I didn't join HTFConnect, I would not have built LetsShill and would not have won the category, "First 30 Quality Submissions".

Fourth HTFConnect!

Shivay Lamba joined as our special guest, GSoC mentor, to guide us about Google Summer of Code (GSOC) and Open Source Contributions!

Things I Takeaway

1. GSOC is a global program that focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development.
2. Students will write a proposal about their programming project and if get accepted, they will work with open source organization for 10 weeks.
3. Matters is your proposal. If you truly understand your project, have a clear vision, and understand your contribution, you're good.
4. For your proposal, the judges will consider if you have contribute to open source before, the activeness, what have you done so far, describe how you feel about solving/contribute that specific project. Guide on Writing a Proposal
5. Google wants students to get inspired, become self reliance.

Speaker Session and What People Learnt 🗣️

Dear performant app by Nishu Goel

Things I Takeaway

1. Optimizing the application as much as we can.
2. Use Web.dev to analyze the website's performance and how to improve the performance.
3. First Contentful Paint (FCP): the time the application takes to load on the browser for the first time. Good FCP is 1.8s and bad FCP is 3s.
4. There are 3 Core Web Vitals which are loading, interactivity, visual stability and they use metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift, essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
5. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the largest time your application could take for the first content successful render. Good LCP is 2.5s, bad LCP is 4s.
6. First Input Delay (FID): the first time the user interacted their video application, a click, a hover, what was the response of the browser, how much did it took. Good FID is 100 ms, bad FID is 300 ms.
7. Cumulative layout shift (CLS): a measure of the largest burst of layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of a page. Good CLS is 0.1s, bad CLS is 0.25s.
8. Improve LCP by using inline critical CSS, inline fonts, optimize files (use imagemin, use CDN, responsive images, newer formats (webp, jpeg2000)
9. Improve FID by deferring unused JavaScript (code splitting, async/defer). For example, only load the Login module if the user click the Login page.
10. Improve CLS by giving dimensions to images, iframe, elements, and only show the content when the user is expecting it.

Build a Twitter UI Clone using React JS by Praveen Kumar

Things I Takeaway

1. Using CodeSandBox to code ReactJS application.
2. Using SassMeister to translate SASS to CSS.
3. Using Bootstrap to build responsive website

After looking all the Twitter's posts about speaker sessions, it makes me want to join more sessions and learn! Do check out HTF's Schedule for future sessions!

Let's share some AMAZING HTF milestones! 🥳🎉🎉🎉

@hackthisfalldev crossed 1000+ Community Members on Discord!

@hackthisfalldev became MLH Member Event for season 2022

@hackthisfalldev has crossed 1000+ registrations & discord members! #Github tee

Reasons why I love about Hack This Fall

1. Speaker sessions are teaching hackers and inspire hackers to teach others. The sessions can help hackers to get ready for the Hack This Fall which will take place from October 22 at 12 PM IST-24, 2021.
2. HTFConnect encourages hackers to step outside of the box, learn from one another and share what they learn.
3. Get SWAGS by participating the speaker sessions and HTFConnect. You can get free digital swags on HTF's Swag Page
4. I get to meet AMAZING Hackathon Evangelists and Hackers!

Hack This Fall Social Media Links

1. Visit Hack This Fall for more information🚀
2. Register on Devpost and use referral code HTFHE097
3. Join HTF Discord Community
4. Twitter
5. Instagram
6. LinkedIn
7. YouTube

If you have any other questions, you can contact Siddharth, an organizer of HTF. Here are some of his links below:

1. Twitter
2. Instagram

Please also reach out to Hackathon Evangelists on Discord if you have any queries because we are here to make sure you have a great time at Hack This Fall. If you see any "Hackathon Evangelist" tag, feel free to reach out. :)

You can also reach out to me, I'm happy to help :):

1. Twitter
2. Instagram