HACC 2017

23 Sep 2017

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HACC 2017 was an incredibly challenging experience for me. The atmosphere was friendly, and the talks were very informative, but I spent much of my time at UH with the band, so I hadn’t really connected much to my peers in the ICS department. This event changed my outlook on things by throwing me into the fire of ICS 491.

The first challenge came very early - I had only one friend in the class, and we didn’t even want to work on the same project. I considered the project he was working on, but in the end, decided to open up my horizons and explore the other challenges that HACC brought to the table.

After much deliberation, I was placed into a group that was working on the OHA Challenge: a group that was tasked with the visualization of data given from an Excel file. This file would need to be parsed and its information extracted. As it turned out, this would be one of the greatest challenges we would face.

Getting off of my feet for this challenge wasn’t easy - I had commitments with the band, and a lot of other classes on my plate, one of which I ended up dropping. Needless to say, my contribution to this project wasn’t what I had wanted it to be - I was only ever able to speak with my team for moments at a time, and some of the team members didn’t even show up to the final presentation, one of them being the one who had built most of the project.

This failure had taught me a lesson in accountability that I had never had to deal with before, since most of my software engineering experience went very smoothly in other classes. It was simply a reminder to stay aware of the dangers of having many group members - to stay ahead of the creeping complacency that can descend upon any project.