Maker Journal June 2025

Maker Journal June 2025
Photo by Caleb Steele / Unsplash

June was all about the Bolt World’s Largest Hackathon for me. I dove in headfirst, trying to catch up with the whole Vibe Coding trend. I’ll share a more detailed breakdown of the product I built during the hackathon soon, but here’s a quick update on how things went.

World’s Largest Hackathon presented by Bolt
Build with AI for a shot at some of the $1M+ in prizes.

Most of my time went into building my product on Bolt in the Vibe Coding style. But I made a few missteps along the way—mainly, I didn’t start exploring Bolt early enough, so it took a while to get comfortable with the tools. I figured vibe coding would be straightforward as a developer, but the reality was a bit different. I hit a major roadblock trying to get the native mobile build working, and eventually had to settle for a mobile web version instead.\

bolt.new
Prompt, run, edit & deploy apps

On top of that, I had a client project going live in June, which ate into a lot of my time for the hackathon. And to make things trickier, I had a pre-planned family trip during the last week of the month, so time was really tight.

In the end, I managed to wrap up the product as planned. The hardest part was definitely putting together an intro video—I realized I have a lot to learn about video production if I want to pitch my products better in the future.