The QHacks hackathon was the first hackathon me or my team had ever participated in. It didn’t go like we expected but still created an unforgettable experience.

Guard Dog is an ai powered security browser extension that’s meant to protect tech-illiterate people from online scams. With a click, Guard Dog will give the user a threat assessment on the webpage the user is currently on. Along with a risk assessment, Guard Dog also gives an explanation on the dangers and any next steps they should take.

Guard Dog was developed by my two friends and me in three days for the QHacks hackathon.

Even before the hackathon started we held multiple meetings, learning about the competition, how it was held, and past entrants. During those meetings we also discussed possible ideas, without a theme we were more generating a large list of issues we had all come across in our day-to-day that we could pick from once the theme was released.

Once the event had begun, we started by creating design documents and to-do lists that ensured every hour we knew exactly what we should’ve been doing. Learning from our past experiences with Game Jams, we budgeted a whole day to testing and debugging.

I was tasked with the backend JavaScript for the chrome extension, I had no experience in either. Like with my previous project, Kinetic Battery, I turned to the docs, reading through all the things browser extensions were capable of doing and thinking of how we could use them. In the end, I learned a lot more about browser extensions than JavaScript.

My inexperience with JavaScript would ultimately spell doom for my team and i, small issues that should’ve been as quick as a small code trace for someone proficient in the language ballooned into hour long searches.

In the end, we fell just short of our target, running out of time before we could iron everything out. We had almost everything working properly but there were some issues with how the JavaScript communicated with the LLM that we weren’t able to fix in time.

It was during the initial brainstorms where I felt the brainstorming fundamentals that I had developed during my previous experience in game jams were fully utilized and mastered. I also learned that every feature needs to be tested rigorously and constantly, since a small issue that falls through the cracks may end up causing more issues than if it was caught early. I flew too close to the sun thinking I could develop the backend code in JavaScript, from that point on, I was sure to check myself ensuring I was pretty sure I was capable of tasks before taking them. While I still took on things that challenged and pushed me, I was sure to draw the line between a challenge and an impossibility.