My Mini Project Year (Progress so far.....)
Summary of the mini projects I've built this year as an attempt to better myself while having fun competing in hackathons.
Nabil Alamin
Hey Everyoneš, Iām Nabil, a dev, spotty writer, and a serial procrastinator and this is my first article on Tealfeed hope you enjoy it š.
Premise
So Iām not one to make a new yearās resolution because I rarely ever keep up with it. Anyway, I decided to take up making mini projects in the form of hackathons/competitions every month from January, following a previous success in December 2020, where a friend and I were the first runners up in a competition we entered on a whim (might post an article on that later on š).
Intro
Alright, so when 2021 came I had just finished uni and was freelancing so I needed something more to fill up my time apart from light-novels, manga and manhwa...something that was productive, interesting and could maybe earn me a few bucks on the side. After some consideration I decided to go into hackathons at least once a month...

Hackathons allow for you to build, create and innovate on a number of topics and themes, it is a perfect medium to grow in your field, meet people and just generally have fun.
The Projects
- January:
I was already in my first month when I made this decision so I was searching for something to ease myself into doing this monthly..... dev.to to the rescue, there I found out about the Digital Ocean Hackathon and decided to participate.
There were a number of categories but I ended picking up the open ended category (turns out ideas are hard to up with in the momentš¤), after some time I had the idea to showcase the power of AI in photos through some nice effects and filters.

I called it pixai (really generic I know š¤·ā), it had some nice filters, art style merging and photo colorization, all powered by AI based APIs. To learn more about my process of building this checkout this article.
- February:
February came and was almost gone and I hadnāt found a competition to participate in, I searched but found none I felt my ability was good enough for. Luckily a friend of mine introduced me to hashnode earlier that month and while I was browsing some articles I came across a hackathon they were holding in collaboration with aws amplify and decided to enter.
I donāt know whether itās me but I still couldnāt come up with an idea so I decided to try and address that by making something to give me ideas, I decided to make a feed powered by other communities to showcase lots of ideas for the unimaginative (like me š), curious and anyone finding it hard to come up with ideas.
I called it ideabox and started building it with APIs from reddit and dev.to

For more on how this was built check here.
- March-June:
From the heading youād think I was working on a hack during that time but actually I had just gotten a new full-time job and didnāt really have time for anything else (congratulations arenāt in orderš¤, I already resigned, Thatās a story for another day).
Anyway, we are now in June and I have already picked a hackathon for the month, come up with an idea and waiting for the start date to begin execution. This time, I decided to leave my comfort zone and try a different theme than open ended and picked social good.
Take away ?
From the hackathons entered, I learnt to have some confidence in myself, picked up new skills while also having fun. Though I havenāt come out on top (yet š), Iām enjoying myself, learning new things and thatās fine. Plus, the merch and participation prizes arenāt bad in the least.

Stay tuned for my June Hack build and other writeups .
Keep Learning, Stay Creative āØ
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Nabil Alamin
I do it cos I love it

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