DEPLOY/23
The first hackathon hosted by compsigh — the computer science club at the University of San Francisco — and our biggest event of the Fall 2023 semester. An entirely student-bootstrapped, three-day event, bringing together the best minds in CS, design, and engineering to hack on a project for a weekend.
Story
A hackathon is a life-changing experience.
For three days, you put yourself through hell, make lifelong memories with friends, and feel like a rebellious group of misfits, trying to make the world a better place. And when you get up on that stage, and you give it your all, you become the main character, sharing your Hero's Journey.
Despite the fact compsigh is one of the more chill clubs at the University of San Francisco, we knew we couldn't skimp on quality. Cyberpunk vibes. AI-generated trailer. Custom-built platform for participants. DEPLOY/23 was about delivering that life-changing experience through pixels & prose.
Trailer
For a hackathon with a cyberpunk vibe, I felt it'd be appropriate to make an event trailer using AI. In collaboration with our friends at Game Design Club (shoutout to Andrew, Jake, Dorian, Lauren, and Lillian), we wrote up some lore, and crafted a storyboard.
We drew inspiration from games, aesthetics, and stories we'd all grown up with. Those included:
- VALORANT Protocol 781-A trailer
- Revenant from Apex Legends
- Orwellian dystopia stories
- Ghost in the Shell
- Winter Soldier
- Watch Dogs 2
- Cybernetics
- The Matrix
- Rust
- Thanks to OST artist Alex Rehberg for the track Wastes, used in the trailer
I used Midjourney to create each shot as a static image. Then, I used Runway to give it life. Finally, I upscaled all outputs using Topaz Labs.
Watch the DEPLOY/23 trailer on YouTube.
Platform
If we're going to up the quality, Devpost and Google Forms won't cut it. I set out to design-engineer a custom platform for participant registration, team formation, and project submission. We also needed it to accommodate our logistics and workflow for the event, which was in Notion.
Here's the result, written in React & Next.js, auth via NextAuth, forms via Tally, and logistics via Notion API:
You can read the technical breakdown on our GitHub repo.
Shoutout to 
Jet, Quinn, Calvin, and Ani for helping organize this event and keep things running throughout the weekend. All in all, it was exhilerating putting it on, and I look forward to DEPLOY/24.
