lu.ma Hackathon July 2025

A one-day hackathon listed on lu.ma with a 5,000 EUR cash prize, held in late July 2025. Mike and Achraf Adjileye entered as a team and sprinted on a computer-vision mobile game. The hackathon is the most tightly-coordinated piece of joint building in the Mike-Achraf relationship record.

Project

The brief emerged live in WhatsApp audio on July 16, 2025. Achraf proposed a Chrome dinosaur-style game controlled by head movements, using computer vision. Mike answered "Ouais chaud, du coup, de la computer vision + web app"; Achraf adjusted "Non plutôt mobile"; Mike closed with "Encore mieux frr." Scope was settled in a single audio exchange.

The stack: mobile front-end, computer vision inference, a deepsearch Python module shared across both collaborators. Shared GitHub repository invited Mike under Achraf's existing MickBuikder account. A plan.txt file held the coordination plan; README carried the build instructions. Discord integration and a Google Sheets scoring leaderboard were part of the submission.

Sprint Window

July 23–26, 2025. The two coordinated almost entirely through audio during the sprint. Logistics collapsed into single-word WhatsApp messages — "Descends" (come down), phone battery warnings, missed calls as stand-ins for scheduled meetings. Meeting point: Morning coffee (12 Av. d'Italie, 75013 Paris). A side obligation — Mouhite's baptism — was scheduled around the hackathon; the baptism visit was rescheduled to the following day.

Outcome

A post-hackathon debrief took place at Morning on July 28. The chat record does not include a prize announcement. The project did not continue as a product after the event. What continued was the proven co-building pattern: shared repo, audio coordination, divided labor, same-day iteration — all of which reappeared six months later in the January 2026 Transfer Portal collaboration.

Significance

The hackathon is the only documented instance of Mike and Achraf owning the same codebase under a hard deadline. Every other collaboration has separated responsibilities (Achraf on strategy, Mike on execution, separate commits). The sprint demonstrated that they can in fact ship together on one repo under pressure — a fact later relied on when Transfer Portal became the primary shared build.