At Aleph Hackathon, we had what I would call the peak hacking experience. I mean, just look at the photo:
However, we didn't coordinate very well as a team, and ended up built two versions of the same product.
The project was Just Ralph It, an attempt to make heavily automated software development accessible. Before the hackathon, the idea was already quite clear because I had written a detailed explanation of it. We revised the intended architecture, split roles, and started building.
Then, a few hours later, we realized that it wasn't clear what each of us was actually building.
By 2 a.m., one of us had to leave for several hours. The other had slept very little before the hackathon and needed to sleep. We also noticed that working on the same repository wasn't really working, so we split into separate branches and effectively began building two different versions.
Starting again¶
I was having trouble with broken installations, so I decided to make a completely fresh start in a new repository.
I told Claude to ask me "an absurd amount of questions." Once the idea was specified in detail, I started a Ralph loop to build it.
From 3 to 8 a.m., I did little besides prepare the specifications. By 11 a.m., Ralph had finished version 0.1 and gotten roughly 80% of the way there, all overnight. I spent the remaining time fixing bugs and polishing the result.
Meanwhile, my fellow hacker who stayed awake kept improving his version. By the next night, we compared both and decided to go all in on mine.
The submission¶
I woke up 45 minutes before the submission deadline, so the demo didn't represent the product as well as it could have. I didn't even watch it myself until after submitting it. Because of the rush, we couldn't include a video of me explaining the product and had to use my voice-over instead.
Recording the demo
The submitted version was still a bit buggy, but it worked.
The process was messy: unclear coordination, conflicting environments, two implementations, an overnight specification marathon, and a last-minute demo. Still, we ended the hackathon with a working version of Just Ralph It, built, appropriately, by just Ralphing it.
That version built during the hackathon, however, didn't end up being the final one. When I tried improving it in the following days, I couldn't do more than just break it further, so I decided to start over.
I maintained the project open source, available on GitHub, so feel free to explore it yourself and let me know what you think about it.