i attended hackcanada 2025 as a hacker. built tenantshield with talha, fawaz, and shomaaim. but honestly the highlight was the poker side competition. sat down across from ev wong, the goated linkedin girl herself, and walked away with first. she reportedly never played poker again. no comment.

after that i applied to join the organizing team. interviewed for the frontend co-lead. got rejected. james still offered me a regular frontend role, so i took it. two months later, out of nowhere, a discord message: "you've been really active on the discord and participating in team socials, frankly that's what i think we need for a tech lead." and that was that. not sure what i did to deserve it but i wasn't going to argue.

the vp of tech role had two main things at its core: the judging platform and the hackcanada.org website. everything else was in orbit around those. if either broke at 2am, that was mine to fix.

the website was the first thing every hacker, sponsor, and judge saw. keeping it accurate, fast, and clear was an ongoing task throughout the months leading up to the event. not glamorous, but foundational.

the judging platform was the bigger lift. it had to ingest hundreds of project submissions, route them to the right judges, track scores, and surface results at the end of 36 hours without a hitch. every decision had downstream consequences. one bad config and judging falls apart.

i also mentored some hackers throughout the weekend, helping them scope ideas, debug, and figure out what to build next.

i didn't do any of this alone. adelynn, hreem, and oliver were the people i was actually in the trenches with on the tech side. the kind of teammates who just handle things. you don't have to check in, you just trust it's done.

organizing a hackathon is a distributed problem. if one piece slips, everything downstream feels it. having people you trust makes that a lot less stressful.

the event ran smoother than i expected and messier than i hoped, which is probably about right for 700+ hackers over 36 hours. there were moments where things broke quietly and you had to notice before anyone else did. that's the job.

in between: mentored some hackers, walked around the venue, talked with the team. also got voluntold into kitchen duties by james cao. he really did force my hand on that one.

judging hit a snag. we got upsurged with submissions, way more than expected, which caused some minor but real issues on the judging platform. a last-minute addition to the setup, something that seemed small at the time, cascaded into a roughly hour-long delay. and then the world found out all at once.

within about 10 minutes: whatsapp messages, discord pings, phone calls, someone yelling in the group chat, someone else physically at my desk asking if it was fixed yet. all simultaneously. i think i was mid-sentence on one thing when a second call came in. it was a lot.

we got it sorted. but that specific window, everyone needing an answer at the same time with no space to actually fix it, stays with you. you run the post-mortem in your head a few times.

also got to meet jason cameron at the event. the man himself. that was pretty cool.

later that afternoon, the discord was losing its mind over something completely different. rizzrank had made the finals. two rivals, one ai, first to charm a bot into a date wins. the submission made it through. people were not happy. one thing led to another: complaints in the chat, someone started pulling linkedin profiles, witch-hunting for who was behind it. full drama arc. i was just watching it all unfold. honestly a very hackathon moment.

watching hackers build is still the best part. being on the other side this time, making sure the lights stayed on so they could, was a different kind of satisfaction. less adrenaline, more quiet pride.

hacker to organizer is a bigger shift than it looks. as a hacker you optimize for your own 36 hours. as an organizer you're holding the context of every team in the building. that's a different muscle. and honestly? organizer is the most fun role in the building. more than hacking, more than judging, more than volunteering. you get to see everything.

i learned a lot about what makes a hackathon actually feel good. not the prizes or the venue, but the small frictions that get removed. a fast check-in. a judging system that doesn't crash (james threatened me a little too much with public execution)

all behind the scenes of hackcanada26

i'd do it again. if james does too.

none of this happens without every single one of these people. also a shoutout to yash dave and his team for making the partnership happen and supporting throughout.