Developing for Hack the North

How did we get here?

I first met Aayush during my Fall 2025 Shopify internship. It wasn't long before I found out he was a FE organizer for HTN, and that he was going to be the team lead (TL) for 2026. Anyone who's talked to Aayush would know that he loves HTN. He showed me the 2025 website, the parts he worked on, and how proud he was of the end product. Anyone who's talked to Aayush also knows how persuasive and passionate he is when it comes to the things he cares about.

But honestly, it didn't take much convincing for me to get super interested in organizing for HTN. I've always loved organizing competitions, from debate tournaments to the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC), so I naturally wanted to contribute to HTN too!

Also, I was rejected from HTN 2025 :( LOL

Anyways, I attended the organizer open house and talked to some of the people there. When applications opened, I actually really really didn't want to apply (it was too long LMAO). I ended up sending in my application in the last hour.

And you know how the process goes. I was given a take-home assignment (which I ground out in 2 days), and then an interview.

A while later, I was given the offer! YIPPEE!!! And so the journey officially started...

First impressions

I don't think anything will prepare you for how much work HTN really is. Every organizer you talk to will tell you that HTN is a full-time job, and it is, but I think it's a little hard to picture the commitment until you are really thrown into the deep end...

The first few weeks started off chill. We did some onboarding (I worked on some minor fixes for the 2025 website and our internal dash), got to know each other, and familiarized ourselves with the codebase. There were weekly meetings with the platform team and an all-hands with the greater organizing team.

We also had a one-night onboarding retreat where we learned about some of 2026's core values, got to know each other, and wrote letters to our future selves. This is also when I was like "Yeah, I'll coffee chat with everyone on the team!"

Teaser site

2026 was an ambitious year.

The frontend team split off into a museum pod and a teaser pod. For the first month, I didn't get to do much work on the teaser pod, but everyone on museum was grinding like crazy!

Then, the teaser site design was finished. God, it was sooo beautiful!!!

This was close to finals season, so I ended up pumping out a lo-fi site within 2 days (of working on this full time LOL). I didn't worry about it for the rest of finals! But after finals... I would spend the next week working full time on this teaser site.

It was so incredibly challenging to keep fonts, sizing, and placements consistent across screen sizes, and there was some pretty odd math that went into the height-based scaling to make sure everything always fit. Benny and I really locked in to make that site happen haha

Now by full time, I mean I worked on this site from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, a true 9 AM to 12 AM endeavor. But I'm sure you can understand from the amount of polish on this site :)

Static site

I don't know how they do it, but HTN designers are on another level. The first time I saw the mid-fi design for the static site I was genuinely blown away, not only was it incredibly creative, but it was also really really hard to implement.

We split up the work (I got hero and footer) and got to grinding. Honestly, I was so grateful I worked on the teaser site ahead of time because the hero was so incredibly challenging, the animations, placements, and polish that were required on every screen, every resolution, every zoom, were INSANE.

Both the hero and footer were super asset-heavy, so as you can imagine, optimizing performance also took quite a while.

Overall this took another week and a half of working on this full time (thank god this was during a chill time of my life LOL)

Working with other incredible people on this site genuinely blew me away! Like to this day, I still don't know how they implemented:

• the trees spawning/despawning on accordion open/close
• crazy smooth animations
• insane interactivity that didn't lag

It really showed me what was possible from an engineering point of view if you really really tried. And if you visit literally any site in 2026, you might also realize how consistent everything is. Every page has its own color scheme, its own headers, inputs, and such, which took so much designing and a lot of engineering to accomplish.

In fact, the header was a huge headache for me...

Hacker apps

Thank god for hacker app development, I was unemployed at this point LMAO. This once again took another week of my full-time work. Making the whole experience seamless with so many heavy assets, animations, and sounds was really quite the challenge, but at least by now I had become much more comfortable with this kind of development and had a much easier time with it :)

I wish you could see the hacker apps site and go through it still, it is really quite incredible!

Honestly I'm just glad I didn't have to deal with the short and long answers section; Belinda and Ching Lam REALLY suffered through that hahaha

As a side note, there's some pretty incredible engineering that goes into the whole experience, from handling the load of up to 10K concurrent requests to our databases to considering edge cases around answer caching across browsers, this was a really complex project.

When we created each and every one of these sites, the entire team would QA them. So every QA session, we'd be hit with 100+ tickets that we would have to churn through within a few days.

Now don't worry, every single organizer had to go through every single hacker's application. I spent a good 10 hours just reading through all the hacker applications (and that was only my quota; every organizer did this...)

I was able to read through some pretty incredible apps, and some... very AI-generated ones. But nonetheless, it was awesome seeing how many people applied and learning about everyone across all walks of life!

Squads

On top of the team you actively work in, there are also many project squads that you can join. Near the start of the term, I joined the story squad.

Story Squad

2026 was the first year we decided to incorporate an overarching story into the event. From the first reels we posted to the closing ceremony, we hid bits and pieces of a story in every element (can you find the one in the teaser site 👀).

We spent hours, and I mean HOURS, deciding on the story, how it would unfold, and how it would affect the hackers. Meetings sometimes went up to 3 hours long!

All of us were SO excited for this vision. It was really incredible.

In fact, we hired an animator for the closing ceremony video, we acted out the opening ceremony teaser, and we dedicated ourselves to making 2 different balloon arches to commit to the bit LOL

It really felt like birthing a baby in that sense haha

Volunteer Leads

Every HTN organizer is also a logistics organizer.

Obviously not coming close to the actual log organizers, all of us still play a part in the event running smoothly. Every organizer would be a part of a logistics project: sleep, opening ceremonies, judging, etc.

I ended up on the VL squad, so basically hiring the VLs! Jamie (the log organizer responsible for volunteers) got us together to interview and handpick the amazing VLs who would help with the event. We would each spend ~5 hours that week on interviews.

Looking back on the amazing VLs we hired and the work they've done, I am so glad to have been part of this. Like can you imagine going from seeing a VL for the first time across the screen in an interview, asking them about some behavioural problems, to seeing them act that out IRL? It's such a surreal full-circle moment.

These VLs were really the backbone of the event and they took on so so so much ownership, I was genuinely so impressed!

RETREAT

OKAY for the fun part!

Every year, there's a 2-night retreat that almost all organizers attend. We went to the beach, went asparagus picking, went hiking, and just made a lot of really wonderful memories together. I think all of us got so much closer after the retreat, it really felt like we went from coworkers to friends.

There was also some really incredible food. Maggie held a mochi-making class and it was so so so good

Event time :D

Honestly, as the event drew near, I was actually getting really burnt out. I think this applied to most people on the team.

For me, it was just that life got really busy (with the new job and stuff) so I couldn't focus on HTN nearly as much anymore.

But anyways, this is my mini vlog of the weekend!

It was so much fun! Sometimes it was a bit stressful, but not nearly as much as I'd expected. It's really fulfilling to get to work on the logistics side of things too, just setting up spaces and seeing everything really come together. I had a blast talking to the sponsors and learning about what they did, yapping with the volunteers and the hackers, just soaking it all in.

Lowkey the hardware shift was my favourite, I was just heads down running around putting hardware back into boxes or fulfilling hardware orders, it felt like a game.

The food was incredible. Shoutout Ace Shawarma for the banana pudding, one of the best I've ever had LOL

Honestly I wish I had spent more time talking to more hackers; I feel like I missed out on that by being so busy.

At the end, we packed everything up and headed to Bauer Kitchen for the organizer dinner. We received the letters that we wrote to ourselves from the onboarding retreat, and it's crazy how far we'd come and how much we went through to get here haha

Our CDs also wrote us cute little cards and we had a custom playing card set (almost cried going through them). All the little memories we made throughout the past 7 months started flowing back, that first awkward meeting, that first PR, that first site.

I had to leave early, unfortunately, but each of the TLs gave a speech to their team at the end. Aayush gave me my little speech when I was heading out. And I don't know why, I just started bawling my eyes out.

I ended up crying for a good 10 minutes saying goodbye to everyone. All I could think about was how grateful I was to have worked with these people, to have even gotten to know them. The small moments I shared with these organizers, the late nights, the inside jokes, the frantic QA sessions, those were moments I would never forget and would truly TRULY cherish.

So yeah... That was my story with Hack the North. It was a long, difficult, sometimes exhausting 7-month journey, but genuinely one of the best I've had.

The amount of growth I went through is incredible, HTN is the reason I've become such a confident developer. The people I've met are second to none, and they've become some of my closest friends.

There's nothing quite like seeing your hard work come to life with the people you care most about, and I think that's what made this one of the highlights of my life so far. It was always the people who made this possible <3

Interested in joining HTN? AMA!