Mentor to Maker: VibeChekk in 24 Hours Mentoring at a hackathon? The usual stuff. But ever heard of a hackathon inspiring the mentor to take on a 24-hour build challenge? Friday: the 18-hour TinkerHub “Useless Project 2.0” began. I mentored at VJCET — loads of fun, laughs, and build energy. Saturday: crashed at 3 PM, woke up Sunday at 6 AM. Most dread Mondays. But at Peerlist, Monday is Launch Day. More energizing than caffeine? Seeing fellow members launch and share their journey. So, mid-coffee, a spark hit: What if I launch something this Monday? Idea: I wanted feedback on my mentoring — but not through a dull Google Form. The event was full of fun and love; the feedback had to match. That’s how VibeChekk was born. It lets anyone capture feedback on their vibes — events, art, talks, products — quickly and playfully. Sunday, I built the core features. Monday morning, I used my own product, shared it with the hackathon group, and the vibes rolled in — all Fire emojis 🔥. By 6 PM, I was stuck on the payment gateway. By 9, I was half-asleep, ready to give up. But I thought of those students, coding for the first time and pushing through 18 sleepless hours. That energy kept me going. At 11 PM, I shipped the last changes and hit Launch on Launchpad. Then? Straight to bed. This morning: 15 upvotes waiting. Not a bad Tuesday. peerlist.io/vi_c0de/project/…

It starts with a spark, not a syllabus. This weekend, I spent 18 hours mentoring at @TinkerHub Useless Projects Hackathon—37 teams, many of them first-time builders. The kind who are both nervous and unstoppable. The kind who remind you what curiosity actually feels like. All night, I watched them wrestle with an idea that shouldn’t be revolutionary: code doesn’t have to be typed into Notepad. Yes, some still thought that’s how it’s done—because that’s how they were taught. In 2025. By colleges still treating programming like it’s 1998. Behind us, a whiteboard full of CSS notes stood like an accidental monument to this problem—teaching code as static text instead of something alive, interactive, and instantly testable. So we flipped the script. I introduced them to VS Code. We watched HTML, CSS, and JS come to life in the browser. We went from “hello world” to “wait… I can deploy this?” in hours. We tried “vibe coding”—starting with their first #ChatGPT prompt, letting VS Code Copilot fill in the gaps, and shipping their creations to @vercel. #Python projects found homes on Render and Railway. We weren’t just debugging syntax; we were debugging confidence. And the energy… it was electric. Not the kind you fake for a photo op, but the kind that hums at 3 a.m. when a team finally sees their app live and cheers like they’ve just won the World Cup. By morning, the wins weren’t just technical. I helped a few take the leap to join @Peerlist, make their first post, and begin their “#buildinpublic” journey. That’s the shift—from consuming to creating, from invisible to visible. Because #hackathons like this aren’t really about the project. They’re about the builder. You start with an idea and some caffeine. You leave with something that exists—and the belief that you can make the next one. Your first deploy isn’t the end. It’s the prototype for the next step. The next experiment. The next late-night cheer when something works that didn’t an hour ago. And that’s a skill worth keeping.