Mercury’s Post

🚀✨ Just bagged the silver 🥈 at the EPIC Software Hackathon! 🤖💻 Can't believe I'm not sitting in the coveted #1 throne, but hey, who's counting? 🙃 🌐💼 Grateful for the journey that brought me here— from countless cups of coffee ☕ to battling the notorious "404 Not Found" errors! 🤯 Shoutout to my keyboard for enduring the countless keystrokes. 🚑💔 🏆🚀 Second place is basically first place, but with a twist, right? 😉 I might not have taken home the gold, but my code is shining brighter than ever in the coding cosmos. 🌌✨ 🚨💡Unlocking innovation, disrupting the status quo, and debugging our way to glory! 💪💾 Because let's face it, normal is boring, and mediocrity is so last season. 🙅♂️🚶♂️ 🙌 Massive thanks to the Hackathon organizers for this rollercoaster of emotions! 🎢💼 And to my teammate David Q., you are the real MVP! 🤝👩💻👨💻 Together, we're the Avengers of Code! 💻🦸♂️🦸♀️ 💡🔍 Now onto the next challenge, the next bug to squash, and the next hackathon to conquer! 🚀💻 Brace yourselves, because I'm just getting started! 💥🌐 #HackathonHero #CodeWarrior #SecondPlaceSensation #TechTrailblazer 🚀✨

If you see me Game Developers Conference today, ask me about how we are revolutionizing the hackathon concept, infusing it with storytelling, and centering the Black Panther Party @ Juneteenth Reality Hack!

"🚀 Ready to conquer the hackathon! Seeking a teammate who's as passionate about innovation and coding as I am. Let's collaborate and turn ideas into reality! Deadline approaching: April 12th. Drop me a message to join forces. #Hackathon #TeamUp #Innovation"

"🚀 I’m excited to share that I recently participated in the 40-hour NeohackSprint hackathon, where I developed a dynamic solution for an Integrated Customer Feedback Management System using React. This system is designed to drive continuous product development and innovation by streamlining the feedback process for improved decision-making. 💡 Throughout the intense and rewarding 40 hours, I worked on creating a platform that enables real-time feedback collection, analysis, and actionable insights, helping businesses stay agile and customer-focused. 💻 It was a fantastic opportunity to collaborate with talented minds, solve real-world challenges, and push the boundaries of creativity and innovation. 🌟 Grateful for the experience and proud of what my team and I achieved! 🙌 #Hackathon #ReactJS #Innovation #CustomerFeedback #TechForGood"

"Grateful for the immersive experience at the Code Off Duty hackathon hosted by LPU! 🌐💻 From brainstorming to building, it was a journey fueled by innovation and collaboration. Excited to apply the skills and connections gained to future projects! #CodeOffDuty #LPUHackathon #TechInnovation"

Do you eat your own dog food? 🥫 Some thoughts on product... With two weeks to go before Fuzzy Labs holds its first #llm hackathon I'd like to share some lessons and reflections on our product journey so far. 🐕 Eat your own dog food* This is crucial. As developers, we know our code inside and out, so it's easy to forget that a customer experiences things differently. You have to continuously place yourself into the customer's shoes, e.g.... - Forget what you already know, and follow the documentation to the letter: does it make sense? Do all the steps work correctly? - Start with a clean environment, and run everything from scratch: did we forget a critical dependency? - Do something wrong on purpose: does it fail gracefully? To build a good product, you need to use it yourself, and behave just like a customer. But as we've learnt, that's not always easy in practice. We constantly have to fight the temptation to work from memory instead of using the documentation, to work around a bug instead of fixing it, and to take a shortcut to save time. *I have no idea where this saying comes from, but at least it's memorable. 🛣️ Focus on the critical path With so many competing priorities, it can be difficult to know where to focus. Having a deadline - in our case the hackathon - acts as a forcing function. But it's not always easy, as we all want to work on the shiny things, which don't always align with the critical path. ⚖️ Validate the thinking Demos and user testing are all essential to product development. You can have the best tech in the world, but does it solve the right problem? You'll never know until you ask somebody else. External feedback can be daunting but without it you're just guessing what the market wants. You have to be ready to iterate, experiment, and change your thinking when necessary. In two weeks, we're opening up our tooling to the world. We've got an amazing cohort joining us at the hackathon, and I very much look forward to welcoming you all on the day!

We won the Gadget hackathon award for the best Customer Account UI Extension — a truly brilliant win by a great team of three at Codup. Building great products is much more than quality coding, great ideas, or terrific user experiences. Yes, these things matter, but you have to have a mindset and a discipline to how you make it. Making decisions mid-sprint, choosing the harder route to save time, keeping the problem you are trying to solve at the center of your thought process. This hackathon got the best out of our star man, Muhammad Fahmeed Qayyum —— he was doubtful before he started, but I didn’t give him a pep talk, or too many motivational speeches, I just asked him to go in and do his best. He did it because he is a wonderful developer, and he did it because he has the discipline that is needed to be a wonderful developer. More often than not, all we need to do something to achieve great results is get down to the core of who we are and how we work, everything else follows through. Of course, he had the support of the whole product team, and his very talented teammates on the business side; Huda Rauf and Maria Ilyas. Great win guys — proud of you all!

Another Hackathon.. Another win.. Another lesson..

Thrilled to announce that I've just debugged the ultimate challenge: completing the Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike in an epic 87 days! 🚀🏆 This wasn’t just about deploying myself across 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada; it was a high-octane journey that redefined my approach to problem-solving and goal-setting. Much like sprint planning and agile iterations, I broke down the trail into actionable milestones, proving that with the right mindset and relentless hustle, any objective is within reach. The trail was a masterclass in resilience, strategic planning, and maintaining a laser-sharp focus on the end goal. Bringing back a wealth of insights, I'm ready to disrupt the corporate landscape with newfound perseverance, adaptability, and a winning mindset. Just as we push code to production and optimize algorithms, let's continue to refactor our strategies, crush those KPIs, and elevate our performance to stratospheric levels! 💼🚀 #NoLimits #TrailBlazer #CorporateAthlete #HammeringMiles #EpicJourney #CodeLife #AgileMindset #OptimizationMaster