What is TerribleHack?

Most hackathons are about coming up with innovative new ideas and making plausible startup prototypes. This one is different. This one is about making terrible hacks! Take some time to make your bad ideas a reality.

Where is it?

For the first time ever, we will be running an online hackathon on Discord from Saturday May 16 to Sunday May 17, 2020. More information will be posted, but this event is open to all!

How it's going to work

We start at 10am Pacific on Saturday. You'll have the weekend to work on a project. Chat on Discord with us as you go! Demos will be at 5pm Pacific on Sunday, where we'll join together for a video call to show our projects to each other. Can't make the call? Feel free to send a demo video as well, and we will all watch it together! Sign up regardless of whether you've got a team, you don't have one but want help finding one, you'd rather make something on your own, or even if you just want to spectate!

Who are we?

We started TerribleHack in 2015. We were young students at the University of Waterloo, eager to temporarily break away from the pressure and professionalism of traditional hackathons. We wanted some dedicated time to mix humour and technical savvy and to share the results with our friends. The result was the first TerribleHack, and in the past five years, the tradition has continued.

We are now University of Waterloo graduates, joined by current students and friends. Now that time and space have no meaning, we're here to send you some much-needed levity over the wire with our first online TerribleHack!

Inspiration

What sorts of projects do people make at TerribleHack? Here are some of our favourites from past events!

DabCoin Proof-of-dab based cryptocurrency. It's like proof of work, but you can only mine blocks if the data from your device accelerometer indicates that you are dabbing. By Marcel O'Neil, David Gu, and Curtis Chong for TerribleHack XI, 2018

LastSecondSlides Use the Google speech-to-text API to generate presentation slides as you talk! Turn what you say into bullet points and fetch clipart from the internet live as you speak. By Tristan Hume and Marc Mailhot for TerribleHack IV, 2016

Smoke Detector Detector Smoke detectors are disruptive and annoying, so to warn you about nearby smoke detectors, this machine starts a fire, listens for smoke detector alarms, and then alerts you when it detects a smoke detector. By Spencer Whitehead, Alex Foley, Ethan Guo, and Scholar Sun for TerribleHack VI, 2017

Take a look at past demos on YouTube or one of our many old Devposts for more inspiration.

While you wait...

...simulate everything you love about real life in our TerribleHack© VR Experience™!

Help Out

Normally this is where we'd ask for some financial help to get food for the event. Since that's no longer a problem, we ask instead that, if you have the means, you send what you can to a charity that's helping out in this time of need. Here are some suggestions:

Canada Helps has a comprehensive list of organizations here.

Also, consider donating to the WHO response fund.

This is completely optional, but if you do, show us a receipt on #contact-admins once we add you to our Discord! If you give us a photo, we'll send you back a doodle of you or a customized VR version of you from our TerribleHack© VR Experience™!

Sign up

What's your name? What's your email? Where are you hacking from? Optional: Thoughts on the movie Cats (2019)? Apply ...and then check out the Facebook event!

About the Team - Code of Conduct - Attributions