Today I attended a hackathon.
Everything was running smoothly. The slide looked good, the audience was with us and we were halfway through our pitch.
And then it happened.
BAM!💥
The screen went completely black.
Silence.
Our roleplay froze mid-scene. Every single one of us turned into a deer in headlights. Sweat instantly appeared, as if someone had pressed a button.
One teammate panicked and started hammering on the laptop.
Click. Click. Click.
Nothing.
Click click click click — still nothing.
And with every frantic tap, the room got heavier. Hearts racing. Mouths dry.
Finally, the horrible truth: the laptop had crashed.
Two minutes. That’s how long it took us to switch machines. Two long minutes of awkward silence and nervous chuckles time we could have spent pitching otherwise.
Of course, this wasn’t my first time being humiliated by technology.
At another hackathon, we had to switch from PowerPoint to our live app demo. Easy, right?
Wrong.
The PowerPoint window refused to close. Stuck on screen, mocking us.
Meanwhile, our app contained a video that refused to start. When it finally did, we couldn’t even get it to play full screen.
So there we were: half-pitching, half-wrestling with Windows, while the audience watched the chaos unfold.
Then there was the time we thought we were clever.
Instead of doing a live demo, we pre-recorded a video of our app. It was 80 seconds long, but since the pitch slot was only three minutes, we decided to speed it up.
2.5x speed⚡.
Biggest mistake ever.
The video shot past like a rocket. The audience blinked in confusion, trying to keep up.
Meanwhile, we were desperately talking over it, explaining features at the speed of an auctioneer. Even we couldn’t follow our own narration.
It was pure comedy.
And then came the LLM incident.
We built a voice chatbot, one you could actually speak to. The LLM was supposed to return JSON in a neat little structure we defined.
Back then, structured output wasn’t even officially supported. But hey, we were bold!
First problem: the hall was loud. We tried recording our voices, but the system only heard gibberish. Total nonsense.
Second try. Microphone close to the mouth. Clear diction.
This time it worked. The LLM responded. Victory! 🏆
Or so we thought.
Instead of JSON, the screen flashed a giant error message:
“JSON parse error: unexpected …”
The whole crowd burst out laughing.
And strangely enough, it wasn’t cruel laughter. It was the kind of laugh that says: “Yep, been there. Seen that error before.”
It felt like the entire room had experienced the same pain at least once and now we were all in on the joke together.
After so many hackathons, you’d think I’d be prepared for everything.
But no.
There’s always a new twist. A new way to crash. A new kind of chaos lurking in the shadows.
It’s like Murphy’s Law has a special VIP pass to every hackathon I attend.
And honestly? I love it.
Because with every disaster, I learn something new. With every failure, I walk away with another story to tell.
Lesson learned this time: Always run a system check before pitching!
And here's to many more lessons to come!