I used to enjoy programming for its own sake and wasn’t very interested in building actual apps or services. That changed after I joined an internal hackathon.
At Yahoo there was an annual Internal Hack Day—an in‑house hackathon where employees formed teams, built whatever they wanted over two days, and presented. I joined every year until I left. I even joked in team meetings that the most important part of my job at Yahoo was “participating in hackathons.”
For me, programming had been either a solo activity or a large‑team endeavor. Hackathons are different: you form a small team and build your own idea, which was a new kind of fun.
On my third try I had great teammates and we built a similar‑image search service called “I want to go to the Uyuni Salt Flats,” which won a prize. It suggested nearby sightseeing spots that looked like famous overseas locations. The system performed better than expected, and the effort was later featured on Yahoo’s tech blog.
After the hackathon we wanted to keep building together, so we applied to SoftBank Group’s in‑house new‑business program “SoftBank InnoVenture”, were seconded there, and took on a new product challenge.
At InnoVenture we built an exercise service called “BAKOON!”.
It was a live‑streaming app for exercising with idols, with motion‑capture for visualizing activity and stamps for communication.
BAKOON! used React Native and Firebase; our technical approach is covered in this book:
Before this I hadn’t built a serious mobile app, nor much web frontend. I learned the basics as I went and somehow shipped.
We discussed product direction including engineering, and also designed the KPIs on the marketing and business side. It wasn’t just programming—I learned to think about the entire product. Marketing and business were more data‑analytical than I expected, and I felt I could leverage my math background.
We operated for about a year after launch and worked hard, but ultimately shut the service down. Still, the 0→1 experience changed what I wanted from programming. Rather than programming itself, I enjoyed deciding on an idea and building it into a product.
That gave me a new goal: build my own products. To secure development time, I decided to go independent as a freelancer.