Before the hackathon even began, we were invited to attend a lot of educating talk-sessions conducted by the pioneers of the tech world. The ones that I liked were "We are all Data Scientists" by Krish Naik and "Brand building and leveraging Linkedin" by Madhav Bahl. These were insightful and gave me a new perspective. We also had some other contests like MyOctoCat where anyone could participate and design their versions of octocat. And a quiz too, conducted on various social media platforms, and the person with the most correct answers won a cash prize! It was a great start to even a greater event!
We all joined the Eduthon server on Discord and were asked to introduce ourselves, which I think is a good activity to know each other. That was not it. We had some really good mentors who were very helpful throughout the event and also answered the silliest of the doubts, which made hacking during the weekend even more of a pleasant experience.
And then the HACKING began. I and my teammate(yes, only 2 people in the team) had a plan in our mind, but now came the real test, we had to code it all out, and that too in mere 40 hours or so.
So hello coffee, my dear friend, and oh you brought sleepless nights with you too?
We were asked to create a public GitHub repository beforehand so that they can check the timestamps of each commit and ensure that no one is cheating, quite commendable, I must say. The work was divided and we were coding like crazies. In all honesty, we had learned some part of the implementation beforehand but it still cannot make up for the humungous task in front of us, which was completing the whole project.
But you just can't expect someone to code for 48 hours straight, right? So we had some fun mini-events in between where all the hackers(sounds so cool) played scribble.io. In case you don't know, it is kind of like Pictionary on your phone. It was fun while it lasted, but one thing that is not fun is debugging.
When python throws indentation errors at you, just burn your laptop and contemplate your life. Just Kidding!
Anyway, we coded to our best capabilities, made an almost complete project(some features just didn't work out as we wanted), and we were getting closer to the deadline. We also had to submit a demo video and update the README.md in the GitHub repository as well. The panic was setting in. I had no prior experience in making demo videos and it took a lot of time to do so.
But finally, we were done by 8:30 in the morning. The deadline was 9am, yes we finished half an hour before the deadline. Organizers were very considerate and they extended the deadline because we all know, how hard it is to finish a project, and not being able to submit it just because of network issues, is just heartbreaking. A total of 116 projects were submitted that day!
As much as I would like to say that I was nervous while we waited for our round one results, that just didn't happen. Because firstly, I was content with the fact that we finished what we planned, and secondly, I was super sleepy that I just slept through the afternoon. At around four in the evening, the results came and we qualified for the second round! We were in the Top-15 teams. Yippee!
But wait, now we had to present our project in front of a panel of judges who were highly accomplished in their fields. In all honesty, it was nerve-wracking. And we were the first ones to present our hack.
The judges made us feel comfortable, at first I was so nervous that I wasn't even audible but then I slowly got comfortable and was able to answer the questions asked to us.
We didn't win unfortunately but it was a great experience and I am thankful that I got to be a part of it.
Author: Apoorva Sinha
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