March 2019: City of San Fernando, La Union — ICT Summit

First Hackathon Experience

Event: ICT Summit Hackathon
Role: Co-Lead of Development (Representing our school)
Duration: 24 Hours
Tech Stack: Vanilla PHP, Bootstrap

March 2019 was my first ever hackathon.

We represented our school and had only 24 hours to conceptualize, design, and build working applications from scratch.

We didn’t win the competition —
but that experience shaped me more than I expected.

What We Built

Within 24 hours, we built two functional applications focused on solving real community problems.

1️⃣ Farming Inventory & Sales System

A system designed for:

Farmers
Local government units

The goal was to:

Track agricultural inventory
Monitor sales
Improve transparency between farmers and the government
Help digitize small-scale farming operations

2️⃣ Government Queueing System with SMS Notifications

A queue management system for government transactions that:

Assigns queue numbers
Sends SMS notifications to citizens
Reduces physical waiting time
Improves transaction flow inside government offices

The idea was simple:
Less waiting.
Less crowding.
More efficiency.

More Context (The Hidden Pressure)

During this time, I was also the leader of our research/thesis group.

So while preparing for a 24-hour hackathon,
I was also making sure our thesis progress stayed on track.

If you’re curious about that project, here’s the full story of our research:

👉 https://jonreygalera.vercel.app/timeline/leading-iteach-mobile-learning-app

Balancing:

Academic responsibilities
Team coordination
Hackathon preparation
Development tasks

It was one of my first real lessons in time management and responsibility.

And honestly, the sleepless night during that event leveled up my programming skills.

When you’re forced to debug at 3AM, optimize under pressure, and ship something that must work before the deadline — you learn fast.

No frameworks.
No shortcuts.
Just raw PHP, Bootstrap, caffeine, and pure determination.

What I Learned

We didn’t bring home the trophy.

But I gained something more valuable:

Building under extreme time pressure
MVP-first thinking
Leadership under stress
Balancing multiple major responsibilities
Delivering working software fast

That 24-hour sprint — while juggling thesis leadership — made me realize:

I genuinely love building systems that solve real problems.

And maybe…

That was the real win.