Objectively, I’m pretty good at winning prizes at hackathons. I’m not entirely sure how/why, but I am. In this article I intend to try and describe some of the things which have helped me and my teams at hackathons. Please note that these are merely my experiences. Your mileage may vary.

I woke up at 8:00 on Thursday morning. After a quick shower, I went down to eat some breakfast (provided again by Facebook). Then, we got on a bus and went over to Facebook HQ. This is a picture of building 18, one of the smaller buildings on the campus.

This morning I left for a hackathon at Facebook Headquarters. I had to wake up at 3:30 since the flight was at 7:50 and I had to pick up Sam and Jack on my way.

We qualified for the Facebook hackathon at MHacks with our Datanium project. Unfortunately, Robby was unable to make it to the finals since he had too many assignments and projects due this week. So we ended up replacing him with Jack Garner who I had on my HackCU team and on my ICPC team.

Today I competed in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Rocky Mountain Regionals at Colorado State University (CSU).

ICPC is the International Collegiate Programming Contest. It’s an algorithmic competition for college students. I’ve competed in ICPC three times now, but today was the best my team has ever done. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Some background on what we did.

Today was the end of our cruise :(

I woke up rather early to go say goodbye to Alex and Eric.

Then we went to eat breakfast. Then we finished packing our bags and then played some ping pong while we waited to disembark. Eventually we just decided to play stupid and just get off because we started to be concerned with getting to the airport on time. It worked, and it was a good thing because once we got off the ship we had to wait in a massive queue at immigration. Still, we made it to the airport with plenty of time.

Today was another day at sea. The seas had calmed down, so the ship wasn’t rocking much at all. I spent a lot of time playing ping-pong, swimming, and playing chess (sound familiar). I played one guy who was really good (at least compared to me) rated ~1500. I’m doing well to stay above 1100.

I also tried to help Alex and Eric become better at chess. Hopefully I taught them OK.

Today we were at sea. I had a lot of fun, but it isn’t very interesting to write about. I woke up pretty late, but I spent the day swimming and playing ping pong and chess. The waters were a bit rough, but not too bad throughout the day.

This evening was formal night. I dressed up all nice in my suit and tie.

Today we were in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. We disembarked and met our guide. He took us on a short tour of Puerto Limon by car on the way to the zipline. He talked about some of the interesting sites in Puerto Limon and described some of the culture of the city. One interesting fact is that Puerto Limon is the largest port city on the Atlantic side of Costa Rica.

Today we transited the Panama Canal. I’m going to first describe what we did and then give you some of the interesting facts that we learned about the Panama Canal.

What we did

Our boat arrived at the Atlantic side of the canal at about 07:00. They opened the bow for people to go outside and watch the transit. We got a pretty good place at the front of the boat.

Today we were in Cartegena, Columbia. We only had a couple of hours in the city because tomorrow we are going to the Panama Canal and we need to be “in line” at the canal pretty early in the morning.

Our guide met us at the cruise terminal and took us around the city. Our first stop was at the main fortress: Castillo San Felipe de Barajas.