High School (OneHacks II) - Age 14

This was my first hackathon ever, so it's a project that's pretty close to me even though it's not the most technically impressive thing I've built.

I made Virtual Study Rooms during COVID because studying alone at home sucked. I'd always studied better with friends around, even if we weren't working on the same thing. Remote learning killed that completely, and Zoom study sessions felt forced and awkward.

The app was straightforward: you create or join an 8-digit room code, and once you're in, you can chat with friends, see everyone's to-do lists, use a shared Pomodoro timer, and play lo-fi music. The idea was just recreating the feeling of being in a study room together without the overhead of video calls.

We built it with Svelte, Node.js, Express.js, Firebase for real-time updates and auth, and Bulma CSS. Everything in the tech stack was new to us, so we spent most of the hackathon figuring out errors and reading documentation. We also added Twilio so you could text room invites to friends, and made it work on both mobile and desktop.

The room system let multiple people join the same space, share notes and homework in the chat, track tasks with live-updating to-do lists, and stay synced with the Pomodoro timer. Pretty basic functionality, but it worked.

We won 2nd place overall at OneHacks II, plus awards for Best Web Monetization and Most Creative Use of Twilio. More importantly, my friends and I actually used it to study together during remote learning, which made it feel worth building.

It's not complex, but it was my first real project that other people used, and it taught me that solving a problem you're actually dealing with is a good place to start.