Last weekend I joined a hackathon with people from from all over the world. Did you say “What is a Hackathon?” The rules were pretty basic, teams of no more than 3 and you have 24 hours to build whatever you want as long as it is aligned with a new theme each year and Sitecore related. Never heard of Sitecore? Some of the world’s best website run on Sitecore.

Basically the goal is to be a complete rock star and stay up all night coding until somebody on your team takes the baton and you try and take a break. I have the pleasure of knowing one such rock star, Rodrigo Peplau, who did exactly that AND survived! He now has the help of the AI overlords every time he works with Sitecore. His team created it and could have kept all the power for themselves, BUT THEY MADE IT INTO CHROME TOOL, MVPinny (link below), FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO USE!! Go Team Go Horse!

Being my first one, I definitely felt like I was playing the recorder instead of rock with my team unable to find a problem to solve. That is where value can be derived from the effort. We also live on other sides of the world and the hackathon actually starts at 8 PM EST. After some discussion my partner was to get everything setup, but we couldn’t nail down an idea of what to build. When I awoke to the sunrise, our friend Rodrigo was passing the baton. My team, didn’t even have anything setup. To make matters worse, I couldn’t even qualify because I didn’t have the license file needed or access to XM Cloud to spin up an environment to build it. Either way I’m not here to put my teammate on blast, I am happy he let me join his team to begin with.

Then the best thing happened. Barbara and London joined in on the festivities! This was good because everyone in the house were sick and raining outside. So my new team of 3 head off into AI land to build what was unobtainable, that killer hackathon idea app. Then we started having fun, I introduced them to GitHub and started to find what options looked best for what we were trying to do. I found an excellent template (link below) which was a great starting point and had a lot more to it than I had expected. Since it was a repository on GitHub I was able to easily open it in GitHub Codespaces and walking Barbara through the readme.md file, hooking up my OpenAI API key (Barbara now knows what a real secrete is) we were finally off to the races. Our first iteration was a pirate, I was afraid he was NSFW but had some good ideas.

Everything is going great, Barbara actually has hands on the keyboard and we are having some great conversations. One of my favorites was when I was explaining Async vs Sync and got to throw in a potty joke which made her laugh. After some code tweaking and clean up we had a smart lil guy we were proud of.

Once we were done with that we wanted to give Hedgy life so we decided to push through and deploy him ASAP. At this point time is running out and Akshay Sura, who started the hackathon, is even expressing interest. Since Barbara did so well I wanted her to make her first commit on GitHub. So we set her up with a shiny parent-protected email address and a GitHub account. Then after pushing it was done. I was given way more than could have imagined.

To everyone who attended, I look forward to next year. A special thanks to Akshay and all of the judges! I can tell it is a labor of love and joy. Thank you for making it all the way through! If you are wondering about Hedgy, he is fine, just asleep. Use MVPinny instead!

https://github.com/Sitecore-Hackathon/2024-Go-Horse - MVPinny

https://github.com/Sitecore-Hackathon - Sitecore Hackathon Official Repo

https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain-nextjs-template - Excellent starting point for langchain and Next.JS