I've built at over 40 hackathons, across different themes, tech stacks, and teammates.
The magic moments came from pushing through the unknown with strangers and ending up with something real.
My earlier projects were mostly focused on winning. Later ones became more about exploration, learning, and building useful things from personal intuition or a vague hypothesis. I am now most interested in product-shaped engineering: forming a clear concept, building just enough of the system to test it, and learning from real users.
Most of my hackathons were pre-LLM. I'm grateful I learned the hard way, before some of those lessons became harder to come by.
I have a couple of products still in the oven. In the meantime, here are a few things I've built along the way.
Crowd energy overlays for stadium video
Adds a crowd-energy layer to stadium video, turning chants, volume, and seating-section activity into overlays that make match footage feel more alive.
The prototype combined crowdsourced viewpoint data, Gemini video interpretation, heatmap-style activity visualisation, and speech-bubble graphics for fan reactions around the stadium.
MCP apps generated on the fly
Generates interactive MCP apps on the fly, giving ChatGPT or Claude-style hosts a way to present context-aware UI instead of only text responses.
The app takes a user request and creates a working interface inside the MCP host, from travel maps to trivia games to budgeting tools.
AI news anchors for Reddit’s front page
Turns Reddit's front page into an AI news stream, with synthetic anchors adding context and commentary to fast-moving internet stories.
The show runs on Twitch with AI-generated voices, anchor personas, a live topic feed, an animated news ticker, and an automated content pipeline.
v2 in-progress
An in-progress tax product rebuild focused on making tax workflows easier to complete, review, and automate.
The current work is a v2 rebuild across the frontend, backend, and document-processing pipeline.
Karaoke for movies with AI actors
Karaoke for movies: a playful way to act inside a favourite film, remix the premise, and practise scenes with AI actors.
Users choose a movie, add a twist, select a character, then play through generated lines with scene images, voices, music, and supporting roles.
WINNERChunk Better
Improves the RAG chunking step so retrieval quality is not locked into one fixed chunking choice.
It evaluates different chunking strategies, including size, meaning, and relevance, then feeds response accuracy back into the re-chunking loop.
Fly together on BlueSky
Helps Bluesky users find relevant people to follow by turning scattered posts and profiles into curated interest groups.
The prototype used AI content curation and retrieval over Bluesky data to recommend users with shared topics, communities, and social context.
TA support for repeated student questions
Reduces repeated student-support work by helping teaching assistants answer recurring course questions.
It sits on top of existing class channels so students can get consistent help without forcing TAs to rewrite the same answers.
Character chatbots from webnovels
Turns long-form fiction into character chat experiences, making it easier for readers to talk with personalities from the stories they follow.
The pipeline extracts character context from webnovels and serves the resulting AI characters through a Discord bot.
Noise-aware compiling for quantum circuits
A noise-aware compiler for quantum circuits, built for AWS Braket and quantum computing workflows.
It combines qubit fidelity optimisation, ZX calculus circuit redesign, and a noise testing suite.
Express and react freely in VR
Empowers people in VR to express richer emotions and reactions beyond the limited gestures available in many virtual spaces.
It provides animated 3D emoji reactions, a hand-menu spatial interface, throwable reactions, and voice-triggered auto reactions based on sentiment and keywords.
WINNERPolicy and prototypes for metaverse governance
This metaverse governance project explored how policy, safety, and digital rights could work across persistent XR spaces.
Across a three-month APAC policy hackathon, the team developed a policy proposal and two technical demos to communicate the solution through working prototypes.
WINNERAgentic triage for public complaints
Built ComplainToUs, a legal self-help platform that helps users lodge complaints and route them to the right agency across 15+ Australian complaint bodies.
Provided the initial MVP/code and consulting that helped inform Hear Me Out, a complaints platform that later expanded across Australia's NSW, Victoria, and federal complaint pathways.
WINNERTalk to Everyone Everywhere All at Once
Helps creators and public figures scale their presence through AI-generated selfies and AI-powered fan conversations.
The prototype let fans generate selfies with a famous figure and hold voice-to-voice conversations with an AI personality and voice based on that figure.
WINNERPersonalise your favourite stories
Makes learning more engaging by generating personalised educational stories and illustrations for K-12 students.
Students upload their story, choose a visual style, and pick a famous figure to replace a character – then receive an augmented version with narrative and illustrations reflecting that replacement.
WINNERGive patients a pain-t brush
Gives patients a more expressive way to communicate subjective pain to clinicians and loved ones.
The mixed-reality concept combines pain painting, patient pain profiles, clinician dashboards, and gamified recovery experiences.
WINNERThe Trees speak for you
Helps hackathon organisers understand team health during an event instead of waiting for post-hack surveys.
It visualises each team as a growing tree based on GitHub progress, communication, and participation signals, with an AR model teams can share afterward.
WINNERVehicle for Accessible Music Composition
Makes music composition more accessible by turning driving mechanics into a creative interface for sound.
Players compose by choosing cars, changing speed, collecting musical power-ups, looping sounds, and collaborating in a racing-game environment.
Fun, Intuitive and Collaborative Travel Planning
A collaborative travel-planning product for making group trips more intuitive, shared, and decision-friendly.
Solo hacker. MVP with user validation and pitching to VCs followed by Q&A.
1st Place Shark Tank
WINNERTransforming Healthcare, Simplifying Medicine
Helps make medication information easier to understand so patients can make safer health decisions.
The prototype focused on simplifying medicine details and supporting safer medication consumption through a more accessible healthcare interface.
WINNERA healthier model, for a wealthier you
Gives patients more control over health data access, oversight, and monetisation.
The blockchain-based platform lets users manage who can access their data and share value with researchers, clinicians, or organisations they support.
Anti-consumerism ecommerce
An ecommerce experience designed to discourage excessive spending instead of maximising checkout conversion.
It combines shopping, budgeting, saving goals, and persona-based nudges that challenge users before they overspend.
AR support for safe physical reopenings
Helps universities and small organisations manage safer returns to shared physical spaces.
The system combines health-status workflows, dashboards, and AR overlays that let staff quickly check compliance at classrooms or offices.
Emotion practice for children with autism
Helps children with autism practise recognising emotions and gives parents clearer feedback on their progress.
The toolkit spans mobile, web, and Oculus VR, using emotion recognition, child onboarding, parent dashboards, and practice experiences.
WINNERDAO-managed community funds and tools
Helps communities make funding decisions more transparently while surfacing local sustainability and cultural-fit context.
It combines a DAO-style proposal and voting platform with ArcGIS StoryMaps, tree-foliage analysis, and demographic/community data.
WINNERVR sustainability choices at planet scale
Shows everyday shoppers the environmental impact of their buying choices through an immersive VR grocery experience.
As users add items to a cart, the surrounding world changes: trees deteriorate, water recedes, and trash appears to model the consequences of consumption.
About a dozen older projects are still in the archive; I’ll add them here as I clean up their writeups and assets.