Spontaneous Trip to Paris

On Thursday, my friend Max texts me: “Hey let’s go to Paris for a hackathon.” Hackathon are competitions where you build out some idea / product for a day, and then you present it. I am not usually spontaneous, but a few weeks ago at a hackathon I got such a good introduction to someone and kept some interesting conversations going afterwards that I thought – let’s go. This is the website of the event btw.

Booking tickets late is stupid, costly, and stressful. So is packing, and as I used my university backpack I forgot to take out my set of screwdrivers, which was taken away from me on security. So was the bike lock, that I tried to import to be able to use with my friends bike… Anyways…

I called up my friend Theophile, who lives in Paris, if I can stay at his. Had a wonderful time, as always. We went to the Hackathon, and we had an idea from the start: we wanted to use AI for forensic sketching. And that is what we eventually did. A nice little video of our product, called ShareLock, can be found here. Other than that, we have been talking to a bunch of interesting people, chilling and eating free food (I actually ate too much, and the chair under me broke – not even kidding). Eventually, the judges gave us 2nd place out of 44! This was amazing, since coming such a long way, I wanted to make the most out of it.

Some pictures: this is our lovely team!

And this is my lovely host. He let me use his bike, which was super fun. Biking around Paris is AMAZING. There are actually plenty of bike paths, and nobody respects the rules of traffic, so you have to pay a lot of attention to what you are doing.

So that is it. We went out Saturday night to celebrate. We were all super happy that it went so well, but I hope you can feel that we had a lot of fun building and presenting our solution. I was also losing it a lot cause I could not believe I was in Paris. What a surreal weekend it was, I am super grateful for it.

Till next weekend!

Michal