My First Hackathon

Let’s see, Where do I begin? I will start with how I came to know about this hackathon. A few months back Joel had sent me the link of wmn; India’s largest women’s Hackathon. At that point, the registrations hadn’t begun yet and I thought I would sign up for it once the registration portal opened. Naturally, I forgot about this and remembered only when Niranjana called me up asking if we could form a team and participate. So I set up my profile on Devfolio and applied for the hackathon, Niranjana and Ashwathy being my teammates.In a day or two, we received an acceptance mail.

The hackathon was to be held on June 1st and 2nd at the RazorPay HQ in Bangalore. I was quite excited, mainly because of two things:

1. This was my first hackathon

2. I was going to be travelling without any ‘adult’ supervision outside the state for the first time.

Since Niranjana and Ashwathy were starting off from Calicut, it meant I would actually be travelling alone. I started off on 31st morning from Ernakulam and reached Bangalore at around 7:45. I stayed at my cousin’s place and left the following morning to the RazorPay HQ.

As soon as we registered, we were given a super cool ID card and a whole set of goodies, which included a bag filled with around 4 T-shirts, lots of stickers, notebook, pen, chocolates, even a set of toothbrush and paste!

The morning session was scheduled for talks and panel discussions by by some of the leading women in tech from India. Here are some of the talks we had,

1. Tip Top Type Tips : The workshop was taken by Ms. Sneha Sankar, Creative Lead at Unacademy. She spoke about the importance of typography, made us identify different type faces and gave certain tips on when to use different type faces.
2. Introduction to Blockchain: This session was handled by Sayli Patil, Blockchain Application Engineer at Matic Network. She introduced us to the basic concepts of Blockchain and the relevance of it in today’s world.
3. Code with Empathy — Accessibility: This session was taken by Paridhi Sharma, Developer at Microsoft. She spoke about desigining websites in such a way that even differently abled people can use them with the help of necessary tools.
4. Get started with Open Source: Chhavi Shrivastava, UX Designer at Nutanix spoke to us about Open source projects and gave us tips on how to start with a project.
5. Product Management Skills NO ONE talks about: This interesting session was taken by Taruna Manchanda, Product Manager at Swiggy. She discussed her job with us and what not to do as entrepreneurs or product managers.
6. Taming a growing codebase: The session was taken by Pujan Tyagi & Swatishree Parija, Software Developer and QA Engineer at Playment.
7. Differentiation Through Diversity: Nivedha Venkatesh, Customer Champion at Zapier spoke to us about the need for diversity and inclusion in the workplace and how to go about it.

We also had two interesting Panel Discussions, where the panelists spoke about their experiences and the choices they made.

After this, we had API Demonstrations by different companies and sponsors such as Here, The Digital Ocean, Setu, Hasura, Matic and Playment. They also announced the prizes awaiting the winners.

At 4.30, the hacking began. We initally focused on the product we needed to develop, how exactly we want it to be, how to go about it and which all APIs to use. We decided to create an online career guidance platform, a website to be precise to help students during their pre-university phase. Here, I should add that all three of us were comfortable with front-end development, but none of us had any experience working with back-end.

By Sunday morning, we were almost done with the front-end part of the website, but the back-end was on a stand still. We hadn’t figured out what to do and even though we tried our best in those 24 hours, we couln’t make it work. It was not surprising, since this was the first time we were trying our hand at this field.

When the judges visited us, we told them about our idea and showed them the website we had developed so far. We frankly told them that we ran into trouble with back-end, linking the database to it and finally integrating both front-end and back-end.

After the judgement, the three of us decided to just take a quick trip around Bangalore. Thus, following Google Maps we walked for sometime around Koramangala and got into a cafe. We walked back to the venue when it started raining! Since we had no hopes on the result, we left before the prizes were announced. We boarded a train on Monday morning and came back to Kochi.

On a personal note, I realised I enjoyed working with Front-end at the hackathon and I hope to work on my skills further and contribute to projects. There was a point, a few months ago, when I was disappointed with myself because I couldn’t figure out even basic HTML and CSS or complete the FCC Certification. Then I was convinced that I will never be able to get it done and I might as well say good-bye to this field. I feel like I have come a long way since then. Like everyone usually says, “The only person you should compare yourself with is your older self.” I have grown and developed my skills. Most importantly, I have accomplished something my older self deemed impossible and I am proud of that. Also, I have realised the areas I need to start working on (definitely Backend!). Without attending the hackathon, the self introspection could not have been possible. So overall the hackathon was a great learning experience and I am looking forward to attend the next one!