calhacks 2026
this weekend may have been one of the worst weekends of my life…
i am down >$800 (mostly because of my own unintelligent decision-making, which i will learn from in the future) as well as a general sense of helplessness and confusion at our horrible result @ calhacks 2026. i am also unbelievably piled up with work and except to be sleeping late the next couple of days to catch up.
i pulled pretty much two all-nighters in a row, not sleeping for 48 hours straight to grind out what i thought was an incredibly useful and applicable app that could genuinely save lives and had the potential to protect many people from trauma.
mom and dad, if you are reading this, there is no need to text me to sleep.
this is not directed towards anyone else at calhacks, i thought the event was great and the winning projects were awesome and deserved to win.
yet i had so much hope…
yuvi (uchi ’30) and i built pip, an intelligent personal safety app (think: life360) that used the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope to sense if the user was in physical danger (being assaulted, fallen over, tripped, drunk/impaired, etc) based on the various g-forces on the user’s body and gait. using the microphone and other signals from the phone’s sensor suite, we used claude haiku 5.5 to analyze various classified incidents (hard impact, unstable gait, cries for help) to compute a “risk score” for a person and alert their friends/family as well as even autonomously call EMS if needed (you can read the full writeup and demo at the devpost link here). we did not win anything.
i think what makes calhacks so disappointing is i am unable to find anything we could have done better or improved (within reasonable limits). when i had unfortunate results at previous lahacks or pennapps, i could pinpoint some problems or weaknesses of or project that may have contributed to our loss. yet i am at my wit’s end when it comes to this project. i understand there is an overarching shifting landscape in hackathons and the preference for hardware-based, highly technically complex projects. but within this project itself, i believe i have reached my upper limit on what i could have produced.
i really believed this project could have won. i felt the same about this project as i felt about our bigredhacks project (which did win). i like to think i usually have a pretty good intuition of how good a project is as i’ve been doing hackathons since high school.
i believe it is time to invest in some of my own hardware and really start pushing for large-scale embedded/hardware projects.
much like isef, i believe hackathons are formulaic. we just have not figured out the formula that allows us to win.
a man can be destroyed but not defeated
of course, i do not accept defeat. i know i am capable of winning hackathons at a lower level (e.g bigredhacks). i will be headed to hackprinceton in a few weeks and (hopefully) treehacks and pennapps later in the spring. i’ll try to find some other hackathons to do in the meantime and try to keep building pip.
general conclusions
- i suck at hardware, so i should get better at hardware. how do i do this?
- invest some more money (now that i have a side gig anyways) into personal hardware projects
- my expectations for a good hackathon project is too low
- i think this weekend has pushed my comfort zone a little further (of what i can withstand mentally and physically), which is probably a good thing.
- goals for the near future
- win hackprinceton :)