UNIHACK 2025
An experience that significantly impacted my professional development during Semester 1 was participating in UNIHACK 2025, a university-wide hackathon that challenged teams to build an innovative tech solution within 48 hours. This event allowed me to practise and refine both my leadership and communication skills in a high-pressure and fast-paced environment while building a technically difficult project.
My team consisted of five other students with varying levels of technical experience, most of whom I spontaneously met in a mutual social media server. We decided to develop a full-stack application that visualises sent data from Google’s Places API by displaying a heatmap based on a restaurant’s star rating. The goal of the app is to provide users with a method of identifying local cuisine hotspots when travelling, hence our application name being called Hotspots. With limited time and a complex technical stack, coordination was essential to stay on track and deliver a working demo by the deadline.
Although we didn’t formally appoint a team leader, I naturally stepped into a role adjacent to a project manager, and I took responsibility for managing the team’s workflow, tracking our goals, and ensuring everyone remained on task. Simultaneously, I was responsible for the technical development of integrating API logic, and contributing to both front-end and back-end codebases. Taking on these additional technical challenges significantly strengthened my understanding of full-stack development and API integration. These new skills have since become valuable additions to my resume, strengthening my portfolio and employability.
Applying industry practices, I held regular check-ins with the team to reassess our priorities, offer technical help, and redistribute work when deemed needed. Given the varying levels of technical backgrounds of our team, I tried to support less experienced members while keeping our progress consistent across all departments. Despite the stress and additional workload, I managed to meet my own deadlines and supported others.
By the end of the hackathon, we had built a functional application that still could benefit from some front-end polishing, but was functional regardless. The project’s codebase was set public for the judges and recruiters to view, and we each had an additional project under our technical resumes. While we didn’t score highly in the rankings, I walked away with a new appreciation for leadership under pressure and as a more complete engineer.
Previously, I had viewed myself primarily as a technical-only engineer, as management was not a skill I practiced much. Additionally, negative experiences with poor management in previous retail jobs taught me how damaging mismanagement can be. In UNIHACK, I prioritised morale and team dynamics over raw output, believing productivity would naturally be resultant. This experience transformed how I view my role on a team, and I now see myself not just as a developer, but as someone capable of leading and enabling others to succeed.
