How We Built OutfitMaxxing in a Week and Placed Runner-Up at Alibaba Cloud x AGICAFET Hackathon

Two weeks ago, I came across a LinkedIn post about the Bangkok Alibaba Cloud x AGICAFET Hackathon. I had just graduated and had time on my hands, so I thought why not. I called everyone I knew. Only Tris and Reon said yes.

This was going to be my first hackathon. I was nervous and had no idea what to expect, but I wanted to give it a real shot.

How Team HotFix Came Together

The first problem was finding the right team.

I was not just looking for people who could code. I wanted people I could trust for a stressful week, the kind where everyone is tired, things break at the worst time, and nobody has the energy to be dramatic about it. Min Myint Moh Soe (Tris) and Lin Myat Phyo (Reon) were exactly that. Once they were in, it felt real.

The original idea came from Tris. Reon handled the business side and thought more about how the project could grow after the competition. I took care of the technical architecture and tried to make sure we could ship something real by demo day. We called ourselves HotFix. At the time it sounded fun. Later it sounded a little too accurate.

After we submitted our pitch, four days passed without much happening. Then I got a call from the hackathon support team. They told me we had made it into the Top 8 and asked if we would be able to come on site for the final round.

I said yes right away.

After that call, we shifted into preparing for the final defense. From that call to the Grand Final, we had only three days left. That is not much time to build anything good. It is definitely not much time to build something you are supposed to show in front of judges.

The Idea: OutfitMaxxing

The project was called OutfitMaxxing.

The pitch was easy to explain. You upload a photo of your outfit, and the app gives you three alternative looks for different situations: Casual, Business, and Night Out. The idea was simple to explain: an AI stylist app that generated better outfit options from a photo.

Building it was a different story.

We kept the scope tight because we had to. The user uploads a photo, picks preferences like gender, season, aesthetic, and color, then chooses either Fast or Extended mode.

Fast mode used Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and returned three outfit ideas right away. Extended mode did more work. It generated results with GPT-image-2, then sent them through Qwen3.6-plus to check the quality. If the result looked bad, it regenerated. Only the outputs that passed made it back to the user.

On the tech side, we used React 19, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind for the frontend. The backend was Express 5, TypeScript, and SQLite. For the AI models, we used Alibaba Qwen3.6-plus, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, and gpt-image-2.

We spent that week building after classes, after work, late at night, whenever we could. By the morning of the Grand Final, the app was working.

Then, about an hour before everything started, the image generation feature broke.

The Hour Before Everything

That moment felt weirdly calm and stressful at the same time. There was no space to panic because panic would have wasted time.

The POV feature had broken in our last push, and we did not notice it before going to sleep. Then, about two hours before the hackathon started, we found out.

We split the work right away. Tris and I worked on getting the broken feature back up, while I also handled the testing side by checking the latest HotFix pushes to the branch. Reon kept the rest of the app stable and made sure we did not destroy something else while fixing one problem. On top of that, we had to decide whether to cut the POV feature or force it through.

We somehow got both working.

Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But enough.

When the event started, OutfitMaxxing was still alive, and honestly, that was already a win.

Five Minutes I Won't Forget

For the demo, P'Natdhanai Praneenatthavee, the CEO and CAIO of AGICAFET, volunteered to test the app live with his own outfit.

That part was not planned.

He stood there, uploaded the photo, picked the preferences, and waited while the app ran. Then the three results came back and the crowd reacted almost immediately. I do not think I fully processed the moment until later.

That was probably my favorite part of the whole day. Not because it was perfect, but because the feature we had been fighting with that same morning worked in front of everyone when it mattered.

An Unexpected AU Reunion

In between presentations, we ran into two seniors from Assumption University, P'Krittamet Chuwongworaphinit and P'Sanpawat Sewsuwan, who built a project called AU Spark.

It was a small moment, but one I felt grateful for. Seeing people from my own university at the same competition made the whole experience feel more personal. It was nice to see AU represented there.

Runner-Up

We placed second and finished as Runner-Up in the Grand Final.

When they called our name, I mostly felt relief first. Then it turned into pride.

For my first hackathon, after one week of late nights and one terrible hour right before the event started, that result felt huge. It made all the stress feel worth it.

The prize was three Keychron K1 mechanical keyboards, which was a pretty nice bonus on top of everything else.

What I Actually Learned

Pressure changes the way you think. When something breaks and time is almost gone, you stop caring about perfect code and start caring about what will work in the next ten minutes. I did not expect to feel that clearly in the moment, but I did.

The team mattered more than I realized going in. Tris had the vision. Reon handled everything outside the code. That made it easier for me to focus without trying to carry everything at once. A good team is not just people who can do the work. It is people who make it easier for everyone else to do theirs.

We did not build every feature we talked about, but we built enough to make the idea real and get it in front of judges. That was the right call.

Honestly, I liked the whole experience more than I expected. The pressure was exhausting, but it was also fun in a weird way. I want to do it again.

Thank you to Tris and Reon for saying yes when I asked them to join this hackathon with me. And thank you to Bangkok Alibaba Cloud and AGICAFET CO., LTD. for hosting the hackathon and making the whole experience memorable.