Hack The Drive

Sleepless in San Francisco

By Hunaid Hussain

January 18^th, 2015

HEMEN

It was New Years day (2015), and I was awoken by an email reminding me of the BMW hackathon, the next weekend. This hackathon was a promise I made to Hemen a few months ago, just to get him off my back, so that I can get back to other pain in the neck issues. Hemen, those of us who know him, is a guy with boundless enthusiasm for technology, business and all those things which can make the Benjamins come to life, in those stiff greenbacks. He thinks and acts in hack, even when he does not know stuff, he figures out a hack to make it appear to others that he is in control. Very few things can rein his enthusiasm for life.

I met him in the summer of 2014 when both of us signed for a “no life” iOS bootcamp which drained our summer days like shaved ice on a stick in 90° F heat. The bootcamp was free but it required making one iOS app every week and at times we came very close to melt down. We survived!

So back to rest of the story, a phone call followed by an email from Hemen, broke my resolve to not do the hackathon, after all this was new year and there were no more excuses left to say no. We’ve done an earlier hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt and won a prize there, so we had more pressure to top that off. We met over a cup of chai, from where our journey of two days began. Two days were going to be spent in some warehouse in San Francisco, eating junk food, and talking, dreaming and coding a hack for electric cars from BMW.

Btw, this is in no way an endorsements for BMW or electric cars, (specially for those who are global warming challenged) I’ve not received any compensation whatsoever. Nor do I drive a beemer, or I’m buying one. Your enjoys are the only payback.

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Here we are at the promised warehouse, where our weekend was going to be wasted. we were greeted by some signup goodies, a environmentally friendly bag filled with some candies, t-shirt, and a usb stick full of pdf documents which described all details about how to talk to the car using numerous api’s.

We did pause to soak in the beauty of the car and fantasize what if we can win this. Yes, the first prize was one of a completely dressed shiny new beemer, the electric one and the bragging rights which can land on our linked in, social media and make our friends a little green with envy.

Well almost forgot to introduce you to our third partner in crime, David Luhman, he is our design inspiration in chief and was also a fellow inmate in the earlier mentioned iOS bootcamp. He took rein of the design aspect of our app.

It was painful to see how other folks had already started merrily discussing ideas and writing code, we need to set up our shop running. After some brainstorming and going over the documents we came up with an app idea which could help alleviate the range anxiety of an electric car driver, and thus GotRange! was going to be our spoils from two days worth of sleepless coding.

People were hard at work and I was hardly at work. I walked around on my numerous break to spy what else is cooking and meet and greet some other characters.

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There was way more food than what I could capture or eat. The mantra was eat the food first think of shooting it later. A foosball game was not too far, for the tired nerves to refresh. And Wii U competition was also thrown in the mix to distract from the endless programming marathon.

Finally it was time, to feel embarrassed about the software crashes and struck screens in front of a bevies of judges, eager to find the flaws in two days of our software mess called GotRange! It was a theatre performance and Hemen took charge of the demo with his usual confident, hacky demo speech.

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Ok the moment of truth, we are still looking for another hackathon to win our electric car. After all Life is a hack of sorts, giving up is easy, living up is a Hack!