Women Building for Women: My First Hackathon Story

My first hackathon experience? In one word: fabulous.

This past week, at Knowledge 2026, I had the opportunity to participate in my very first hackathon alongside Selva Arun, Shalin Baier, Jillian Howell, and Mahathi Veena, and honestly, it became one of those experiences that I know I will always remember.

I would absolutely do it again. Knowing what I know now, I think the second time around will be a lot smoother due to the experience we have gained. The entire experience was so meaningful and we had some great moments together as we worked on ideation and discovery.

Our team was made up entirely of women, and for three of us, this was our very first hackathon. Yay, us!!!

From the beginning, we all agreed that we wanted to create something that would genuinely help women. Since this was part of Hack for Good, we wanted our idea to serve a nonprofit mission and positively impact society. That idea evolved into creating an application where educators could volunteer their time to teach and upskill incarcerated women.

We called it Women Beyond Walls: Where Education Has No Walls.

The vision behind it was to help provide women with new skills and opportunities so that when they reentered society, they could pursue meaningful work and create a different future for themselves.

Our application included four different areas:

• an educator experience,

• a social worker/administrator experience,

• an inmate registration experience,

• and a course catalog area.

One of the really neat parts of the project was our educator workflow, which included a Stripe integration. Educators would submit credentials such as their Social Security number and birth date, and the integration would verify their identity. Once verified, the request would go to the social worker administrator for approval. After approval, the educator would receive an email letting them know they were ready to begin registering classes, materials, schedules, and other course information.

Those classes would then feed into the course schedule and become available for inmates to register.

For the inmate experience, we wanted to keep things simple and accessible. Women could either register through a regular UI experience or interact naturally through an AI agent by simply asking to enroll in a class using natural language.

What amazed me most was what five women were able to accomplish in only eight hours. We started with an idea, moved into brainstorming and mapping everything out, and then jumped into building the application itself.

And yes... somehow we accidentally registered for the eight-hour session instead of the four-hour one. Honestly, it turned out to be completely fine because there was no way we would have finished in four hours anyway.

By around 10:30 PM, many of us were running on very little sleep and probably a little too much caffeine. We were giggling, laughing, and trying to pull everything together before time ran out. It was chaotic, exhausting, hilarious, and honestly so much fun.

Although we did not win, we did receive an honorable mention, which was incredibly exciting. I actually missed the announcement because I was leading a session at the same time, but hearing afterward that our work had been recognized was such a wonderful feeling.

More than anything though, the best part of this entire experience was collaborating with these incredible women. Each one of us brought different strengths and expertise, and together we created something beautiful with the hope of helping society in some small way.

At the end of the day, that is what made this experience so special to me. It was not simply about building an app. It was about women coming together, supporting one another, creating with purpose, and using technology to try to make the world a little better. It is pretty impressive what we created in a mere eight-hours!

And of course, now that I survived my first hackathon, I also have recommendations for next time:

• Bring a microphone if you plan to record narration or voiceovers for your demo video.

• Bring a mouse for my laptop…it would have made somethings a lot easier!

• Download video editing software onto your laptop ahead of time.

• Download video capture software too. Two of our computers did not have it installed and we definitely learned that lesson the hard way.

• Bring more snacks than you think you need. Trust me on this one.

• Hydrate all night long.

• Wear comfy clothes and comfy shoes because you will be sitting, standing, pacing, brainstorming, and functioning on adrenaline for hours.

• And lastly, find a quiet room where team members can escape for a few minutes to cry, hahaha. Ok, not crying, but for peace and quiet.

But truly, the hackathon space can be loud and overstimulating at times. A few of us definitely needed moments to decompress, reset, and recharge before jumping back into the fun and chaos again. And, this is totally okay, we don’t all work the same, so it is okay if you need to run out for a bit of quiet time. We get it!

Would I do it all over again? Absolutely. In a heartbeat.