Fewer Than Fifty Interpreters
What winning a hackathon taught me about scope, teamwork and building something people actually need.
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At the Cursor Hackathon in Ghana, my team and I built SignBridge in about four hours: an app that turns Ghanaian Sign Language into English and Twi, spoken out loud, using just a phone camera. We won.
I do not think we won because the code was the cleverest in the room. I think we won because we picked a real problem and refused to build anything that did not serve it.
Start with a person, not a feature
There are fewer than 50 certified sign language interpreters in Ghana for more than 33 million people. That one fact did more work than any slide. Every decision after that was measured against one question: does this help a deaf person be understood today?
Every choice served that person
- Nothing to install and no account, because every extra step loses people
- The video stays on the phone; only the recognised word is sent out
- Twi as well as English, because that is how people actually talk at home
A small thing that works beats a big thing that almost works.
Split the work, share the goal
With three of us and four hours, there was no time for everyone to touch everything. We agreed on the goal in the first minutes, split the work cleanly, and checked in often. The best hackathon skill is not typing fast. It is deciding fast, and deciding together.
