Hackathon Project: Pshiny

Pshiny is a platform for sharing student projects to the public.

How it got started?

I came up with this idea in November 2019 while I was editing my projects for my website. I suddenly realized that a central platform of projects would help students improve their work by peer comments and generate social impact by sharing the insights and findings to the public. So I spent an afternoon at Regenstein doing some market research and writing a pitch deck.

Meanwhile, the Data Analytics Team at Harris School of Public Policy was planning HarrisHack. As Harris School’s inaugural hackathon, HarrisHack welcomes students who are interested in building products that could directly impact the students’ experiences. So I signed up for the event and started to form my team. On Nov 8th, I took the lead to be the first person to pitch at the HarrisHack Pitch Event. I met Mark Amobi and Anirudh (Rudy) Sriram there and was delighted that they were on board. On Nov 14th, I pitched at a Polsky new venture event and received many insightful comments from young entrepreneurs. In the next two weeks, I also reached out to other participants and welcomed Daniela Matinho and Chun Hu to the team.

Towards a good proposal

Now that we had a team, the real work began. Despite the final weeks and holiday, we brainstormed many exciting ideas through tons of emails and Slack messages. On the one side, this was very encouraging because it showed opportunities in this market. On the other side, we needed to prioritize the most feasible and important features. On Dec 20th, we wrote up our proposal that later won us the best idea award! During the process, our idea was iterated many times and became much more mature than my initial idea. In particular, we emphasized on how Pshiny is adding values besides from the existing tools, such as Medium, LinkedIn, Github, and so on.

The real game

On Jan 10th, all 5 of us finally met together at the hackathon. As we already had an idea to work on, the challenge was what should we build in 24 hours for the presentation. It would be too demanding to code the platform website from scratch. Luckily, our mentor Ozan Gokdemir suggested us to use Sketch to design the UI. As I also had experience with the Github Page for my website, we decided to combine the two to design the website demo. Another interesting experiment we did was to collect other teams’ ideas and tried to put them in our website. Put it simply, we wanted to show the audience that Pshiny is “project of projects” and it enables students and the public to have access to these exciting projects after the hackathon.

Here is one example:

We proudly presented our work at the final presentation. Given that we only had one full day to work together, we had achieved great progress by making the website demo works and designing a shiny slide.

Beyond HarrisHack

After a fruitful weekend in the first week of the quarter, we all returned to our busy study. On Feb 14th, our Pshiny team, along with the other three winning teams, was invited to present to the interested Harris staff and students. To prepare this talk, we revised our slides by thinking from the Harris students’ perspective. Generally, the students showed some interest as they had many projects experience and would certainly like to share their policy recommendations to others!