Hacka-demic! My Hackathon Journey
A lot can happen over a hackathon!
I recently participated in my first hackathon; Hack In The North or popularly known as HINT and it was a journey to withhold. In this article, I am going to share that journey and what I learned from it!
Hack In The North:
HINT’s Hacka-demic was a 36-hour long virtual hackathon to code, design, or create solutions to real-life problems. It was from 18th to 20th December.
This year’s theme included:
- The Game of Yore - Recreating one of history’s oldest games from around the world.
- Lockdown Laughter - A challenge to make people laugh using an online prank!
- Go Contactless - Creating a project should give contactless alternatives to some of the work that gets done in public sector/government institutions or any public agency which would otherwise have required direct human interaction.
- Post-Covid Tourism - Building Hack for travel and tourism sector.
- Virtual Gathering - Handling social interaction in a unique way.
To know more about HINT please visit the site: https://www.hackinthenorth.com/#about
After getting to know about the different themes and registering I decided to form a team. Due to the new-born restrains during Covid-19 it was a little challenging to find a team, contacting online, managing. I wondered how will we be able to handle online that too a fully working project.
Finally I found a team, it was a team of 3 members and we named ourselves Techie Sophie. Although I did not know my teammates well but I had a good feeling about us. Our initial meetings through Google Meet included discussions on different topics and ideas. One of our major discussions involved which technology and language to use and it’s implementation.
There were several ideas we discussed. Here are a few of them:
- A flutter app to help supply medicine and food (Go Contactless)
- An app that would act as an information pool ( Go Contactless)
- A crazy software which once installed would make silly noises and do silly things! Something in the lines of desktop goose. If you don’t know about desktop goose https://youtu.be/Fqf_84YgtPc Check it out it's hilarious😂 (Lockdown Laughter)
- Making an updated version of Mario or Snakes and ladders (The Game of Yore)
- A video conferencing app ( Virtual Gathering)
I was surprised knowing about the many varieties of technologies that were involved. With each idea that we discussed had to look into how to make the project, new things that we had to learn, find resources. It was fun and demanding at the same time.
Finally, we decided to make a chrome extension that would help students of IIIT-A during covid.
The opening ceremony of the Hackathon saw talks from awesome people that I really enjoyed!
The coding period lasted from 10 PM on 18th December to 10 AM on 20th December. These 36 hours were actually quite perplexing. Throughout the hackathon me and my team coded, made changes, had numerous meetings, and then coded a little more and then a little more. It was a repetitive loop!
Our aim was simple we wanted to make a project which would find its use during everyday life. There were so many modifications we had to make! Deploying different APIs, adding new features, improving UI/UX.
Changes take place till the last minute and there is always scope for improvement. But to get things together and keep it working is what matters.
At last, the deadline came closer, and we with somewhat satisfaction submitted our project.
We cleared Round-1 and were selected in the Top 30! The hackathon had 100+ teams participating! We were really happy and started preparing for further evaluation.
After several evaluations, the result came out and our team Techie Sophie won the Best Girls Team!
It was a beautiful journey! I learned new skills and made new friends. The hackathon taught me it’s ok to take risks and it’s necessary to have faith in your teammates.
This one is for you Team Techie Sophie!
Take a look at our Project on GitHub (Leave a star too 🤩):
Follow me on Twitter and Medium!
