My Tri-Hackathon Experience
Prologue:
My resolution in 2021 is to attend the hackathon every month, as the consequence of it, I would increase my network and develop my skills. Till Now, I had participated 3 Hackathons — CUNY 2021, KU Hackfest 2021 and Hackabull 2021. In each month, I had gained some experiences, which I would like to share it with you.
First I want to give a basic definition of Hackathon.
Hackathon is the event where programmers and non programmers have to create a hack(project) under a theme/problem statement given by the organizer of the Hackathon in limited time frame(min 24 hours).
CUNY 2021
CUNY Hackathon 2021 is the first virtually held hackathon for the City University of New York students, but we still welcome students from all over the world. With the goal of bringing together students in software development, design, marketing and entrepreneurship to build solutions for problems unique to the New York City community, this 24-hour event will see students create projects and learn from workshops and activities.
It was my first Hackathon of 2021. I was participating in solo at first, later discovered some of the teammates who were from NY. Mostly in all hackathons, you would get to know the themes/problem statement from their website(https://cunyhackathon.tech/), discord/slack server or sometimes you have to ping the hackathon team up. Sometimes there would be no theme at all — something like free for all match in shooting games xD.
I had met my teammates 2 days before the event started. We took a topic as health and basic idea is to create a website which gives statistical information of list of COVID 19 Vaccines in NY and to get some interaction with the website, the patient who got vaccine can give a review about it in website. Those reviews and other information of vaccines would be displayed in landing page of the website. Tech stacks decided to use Django as backend and React as frontend. We planned everything, created a document for it and used miro — An Online Visual Collaboration Platform for Teammates.
At the end of the day, the project submitted with a great failure, we were not able to connect the backend and frontend. 2 Teammates did not listened and were inactive during hacking.
Lessons of my first Hackathon are: Choose your teammates wisely; don’t ever try to pick up the hackathon during exams because it would cause more stress to you and if you’re choosing teammates who are working in different standard time, have a timetable among your teammates for meetup session and manage your health.
Apart from it I had missed some workshops during hackathon, don’t ever miss it up, you would get to know more people at that time and gain new skills.
KU Hackfest 2021
KU HackFest 2021 is a 48-hour long international digital hackathon being organized by the Kathmandu University Computer Club (KUCC) on 19–21 February 2021, in which over 300 students will take part in a virtual meetup environment.
Learnt some of my mistakes back in my first hackathon, decided to have teammates among my college mates — T SATHYA NARAYANA and R.Sowjanya, founders and leads of Devs’ Street. KU Hackfest 2021 — my second hackathon of the year.
This time I had participated in this event by rectifying my past mistakes— improved my skills and chosen teammates wisely. Oooh Forgot to say the flow of the hackathon.
Basic Event flow of the hackathon:
First in each hackathon , the opening ceremony would be conducted where themes, sponsors, workshop session and entire timeline would be announced. They would provide a check in link, where each hackers of their team to do check in within the opening ceremony. If you didn’t check in, then you cannot submit your project and your team gets disqualified. After the opening ceremony, there would be events and sessions would provided by the organizer. As I didn’t attend these events in last hackathon, I tried this time. You know what, got some various information about technology, met new people and my favourite session was Ettiquetes to be followed during technical interviews. Then after some workshops/sessions, hacking time gets started! But normally, participants start their hacking after check in.
After the time limit, the closing ceremony would happen and hackathon team would announce the winners.
So me and my teammates decided to take topic as Open Innovation and was thinking for an amazing idea. We made a basic project , me and my teammates worked day and night for it. The outcome of the project was awesome and we had more confidence that we would win the first prize of the event. I had dreaming of winning the hackathon, but we got failed to submit it in the deadline.
Check this out - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/harikishan-tk-06abb4199_connections-major-mistakes-activity-6769141236805836801-UaC7
Lesson of my second hackathon is: Always use a calendar for the event, it maybe a google or outlook calendar. Finish the project 1 hour prior the submission window get opens.
Hackabull 2021
Here this one, the third hackathon with same teammates of my last’s hackathon.
Hackabull 2021 is a 24-hour hackathon presented by University of South Florida on March 13th and 14th 2021.
As usual we did the check in , me and my teammates vowed this time to win this hackathon. So we brought up the new idea, now beginners you would have some doubt..
Why you’re bringing up new project or new idea in every hackathon?
We cannot re-submit the old project, as that is the basic rule of the hackathon. Otherwise, everyone would had submitted it early, then there would be no challenges at all among the participants.
So this time, I brought up the idea, I felt this project should be something to be useful for lockdown situation. As myself an ambivert and trying to read books, I feel this project should help others who are introvert book readers. So got some basic idea and established a name for it — Bookinder. So this is the website where like minded people can exchange books for free. It is a WIN-WIN situation for both the people, and can bring up profits in terms of new book to read and new connections. My teammates also gave a nod for it and we started working on it.
So we brought up the project with good outcome, as this time we used CSS Keyframes to bring up animations. Due to time constraint, we were not able to create a backend for it. This time we finished the project so early. Okayy time to bring up another thing — how to submit the project?
How to submit the project in virtually?
Normally the projects are submitted in these 2 websites — Devpost and Devfolio. If you’re participating in Hackathons which is in Major League Hacking(MLH), you would submit it in Devpost. There would be a section where you use markup like we used in GitHub README.md , we use same to describe the project in submission process.
It was 1:00 AM, I normally used to submit the projects and my teammates would edit stuffs like GitHub links, grammar mistakes in description of project, etc.. So submitted it up and shut down my eyes.
Woke up, as usual I checked the mail, it became my habit nowadays. Sliding through the bunch of mails and got this thing,
Yay!!! We won the hackathon under a category — The Best First Time Hacker. That’s it, on that day, I got motivated , literally it was a head start for a day to me and my teammates. You can check these out for details of this winning project,
Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/bookinder-g54dfc
Bookinder: https://harikishantk.github.io/Bookinder/
So won the hackathon, here comes another question — What’s the prize? How it gets shipped? Do we have to pay as delivery charges?
Swags and Prizes:
Each developers favourites’ is swags. In each hackathon, there would be swags such as t-shirt, stickers and mask(got popular due to COVID-19). You would get stickers from MLH and the other organizer. If you’re participating hackathon conducted by MLH, you have to fill the Typeform, where it asks details such as size of t-shirt and mailing address details.
You would get these swags and prizes after few months of hackathon because there would be delay in the shipment and permissions among the organizer’s side.
So these are my experiences in my first 3 Hackathons. I hope you got some pretty insight about it. Will meet you in another insightful blog!!
Jaa Ne!!
