Entering the
hackathon
was exciting in itself. Andrew Cook sat toggling between two browser tabs. One his email where he re-read the welcome
email
. The other the event
website
. An hour passed with him toggling these two tabs. He was seated at a table in his favorite
cafe
, but existed in a world excluding pseudo-wood furniture, fireplaces, art on brick walls, indie emo music, and baristas.
The website featured the event details in varying degrees of bold,
sans-serif
font. Carousels of images of the previous year's hackathon flew in and out of view. Cook stared at the faces and bodies featured. Smiling or deep in thought. Hunched over
laptop
s or looking up at someone scribbling onto a
whiteboard
, reaching out to a paper
coffee
cup. Inside glass cube meeting rooms or in open layout studios.
He knew these photos were from the previous year. Not everybody would be there this time around. Knowing this he still wondered which one of these faces he might team up with. In a few weeks would he be drinking a coffee while coding a prototype with that slim, medium-height Asian girl? Or perhaps he would be learning how to deploy the app onto some new cloud service from that long, curly haired Nordic looking guy.
Eventually Cook had to leave the cafe to attend his late afternoon class. The abrupt exit from his imagined world the hackathon chilled him. On his walk to class he read the subject of the welcome email over and over again in his head.
"Andrew, you're in! We'll see you in
Westcity
Friday, October 11!"