My teammate and I recently attended the Hack The Future hackathon in Antwerp, where we took on the Seafence challenge — a strategic submarine simulation in which each round pushed our sub deeper while we defended against attacks from competing teams. The setup made it feel less like a typical hackathon and more like a high-stakes, multi-round game where every decision carried forward into the next round.
The challenge
The format kept the pressure on. Each round you survived sent you deeper for the next, where the constraints tightened and the attack surface from rival teams got harder to manage. It rewarded quick thinking, but also longer-term strategic decisions — what worked at shallow depth wasn't always going to hold up later. Balancing those two timeframes was the heart of the challenge.
Result
Out of 20 participating groups, we're proud to have placed 9th and 5th across the two testing phases. The placements felt like real validation of how we adapted between phases, with the second testing phase showing clear improvement on what we'd learned in the first.
What it pushed
It was an intense, hands-on experience that pushed our problem-solving, teamwork, and rapid-prototyping skills. Working under those time pressures with another person taught me a lot about how to communicate quickly and clearly — agreeing on direction fast, splitting work cleanly, and trusting your teammate to ship their part while you work on yours. None of that comes from reading about it; it comes from being put in a room with other teams and a problem that keeps punching back.
Thank you
A huge thank you to the organizers and mentors at Hack The Future for an inspiring event. The energy in the room, the quality of the mentorship, and the design of the challenge itself made for an experience I'll be drawing on for a long time. Hackathons like this are exactly what reminds you why you got into this field in the first place.