I Won First Place at a Hackathon! | Building an App in 7 hours

Me and a few of my software engineer friends like going to hackathons in our free time and vlogging the experience. This time, we won 1st place out of 75 teams at the Agentic Memory & Context Engineering Hackathon hosted by MongoDB during SF Tech Week 2025! We won $15K in cash and credits and got to meet some really cool people. Here's some realistic behind the scenes of coding our project in 7 hours.

Affiliates:

Try v0: https://v0.link/jake-kang
Learn to code! at https://scrimba.com/?via=jakekang
AI Note Taking: https://go.granola.ai/jake-kang
Music from Epidemic Sound! https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/dmxfyg

Camera: https://amzn.to/3LtF84u
Mic: https://amzn.to/4qCnCeL

My Hackathon Process: youtube.com/watch?v=8a2TBYaPQQc&feature=youtu.be
Our First Hackathon Win: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uedRTJ7h9o
Using V0 to code (and how I won a v0 competition!) https://youtu.be/1Ka0_fSCgc4

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction
00:22 - Our Project Idea
01:08 - Brainstorming
02:22 - Kickoff
03:26 - 7 Hours Left
04:05 - 6 Hours Left
04:16 - 5 Hours Left
04:27 - 4 Hours Left (lunch time)
04:45 - 3 Hours Left
4:53 - 1 Hour Left: everything is breaking
8:26 - Submission Time & Thoughts
8:55 - Our Demo Video
9:26 - Final Judging and Presentations
9:45 - Post Hackathon Reaction!

Follow me and my teammates on X:

https://x.com/jakekang
https://x.com/nickmecklenburg
https://x.com/vatsalbajaj99
https://x.com/PatrykWieczore4

Props to Cerebral Valley for hosting and filming the presentation: https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongoDB-hackathon