Code Off 2017 — An Evening of Code, Collaboration, and Fun.
Nearly two weeks ago, we at Women Who Code Delhi unlocked a new achievement. We organized our first ever hackathon — Code-Off. As hackathons usually go, this was an overnight event spread over two days — 27th and 28th of October. Our friends at Byld, the fun programming club at Indraprastha Institute of Information in Delhi, helped us with housing the teams and ourselves for the night at their lush campus.
(Registrations, registrations!)
We conceptualized Code-Off with a single aim in mind — to expose more young women in Delhi-NCR to the thrill of overnight hacking, collaborating, and the sheer joy of turning an idea into code. The primary eligibility criteria for teams to participate was to have at least one female member on-board. Little did we expect that we were in for as many as 800+ registrations. Yes, that is 800+ enthusiastic young women working to launch themselves in technology.
(Yep, and there’s certainly no place like WWC- Delhi)
Alas! As space constraints would have it, we shortlisted 45 teams to hack overnight at Code-Off. With a diverse crowd of college students and school goers, we kicked off the evening with a keynote from the remarkable Pankaj Jalote, director at IIIT-D, followed by a brief introduction of what we do at WWC-Delhi, from the directors Brihi and Priyal.
(Brihi rocking that stage.)
Utkarsh from Hypertrack informed the participants about the perfect location tracking capabilities of Hypertrack API, and Raj from School of Accelerated Learning exposed them to the world of endless possibilities that full stack development offers, which is also by the way, what they teach at their Hyderabad bootcamp *iff* you get through after a test and interview! You can tell they mean business.
(Check them out for sure!)
(Waiting? Listening? Can’t tell, but sure as hell excited!)
When we were done with all the formal stuff, then came the good part, and the hacking began!
(Here we hack!)
Which Hackathon is complete without swag you say? Honestly, most of us attend our first hackathons solely for the swag — the fancy T-shirts to show off to our peers, and lot of other goodies to make souls jealous. Needless to say, Code-Off had a lot of those as well.
(Code-Off T-shirts, HackerEarth T-shirts, Mozilla stickers, HyperTrack T-shirts, .tech, Code-Off, and Women Who Code Delhi stickers)
And we only have our gracious sponsors to thank them for. They provided us with enough support monetarily and with their resources, and not just that, they gave us swag to keep the participants happy! We had School of Accelerated Learning as our Title sponsor, and Hypertrack and Balsamiq as our Gold sponsors. We were also graciously backed by Brave Software, GitLab, our Silver sponsors, and Mozilla Delhi, CubeHost India, and Coding Ninjas as our event sponsors. UXPin, Twillio, .Tech Domains, Jon Snow Labs, Sticker Mule, and New Relic were our amazing tech sponsors, because searching to use tech stacks to put this hackathon together would have been difficult without them. How can I forget HackerEarth, our platform sponsor!
They are the go-to if you ever think of hosting a hackathon.
(The cutest kit from SOAL, and a handy Git Guide. Thanks, guys!)
Yes yes, now you want to hear more about how the teams fared! Well, TL;DR it was a great experience for everyone involved. Read ahead for the longer version. We had five themes in place, which we announced on the spot. They were — Smart Agriculture, Music, Blockchain, Education, and Healthcare. Seems cliched? Not when you hear out what the teams designed and pitched.
(Midway into their hacks…)
But before I get to that, I think knowing about the prizes we had on offer is important here. There were three categories of prizes. The top three teams with the best hacks, a Hypertrack category for making the best use of their API, and a scholarship worth 1.5 lakh for a female student at SOAL’s awesome Hyderabad coding bootcamp I just told you about.
(That’s how women who code look :D )
So let us get back to the awesome hacks now. Nutshell Coders topped the charts with their genius idea of facilitating collective and collaborative pool farming through a blockchain based self financing system that they called Kisaan Punji. With this, Naman Gupta, Apoorv Jain, Shubham Singh, and Ishika Kakkar took home the first prize, worth fifteen thousand rupees. Following them very closely were G4334R (I found out later that it’s supposed to be Gabbar). They worked on a Moode Analyzer software that works in sync with a brain-waves detecting headset (called Muse) to gather wave-patterns and mood swings between happiness and sadness. This further results into future mood prediction and suggesting measures for mental and emotional health. Gurek Singh, Divyanshu Talwar, Raghav Kukreti, and Chainika Tanwar won the second prize worth ten thousand rupees.
(Those smiles when you have just won a prize at Code-Off!)
The third prize was bagged by Anant Sharma, Shwetank Shrey, Riya Singh, and Siddharth Yadav of team Sneaky Sneks. Theirs was the idea to design a smart system generating sheet music for any song it hears. That’s a lot of signal processing, separation of various instruments in the song. They went as far as using VR to for a visual representation of the lows and highs of the music’s frequencies. In the Hypertrack category, Yugal Sharma, T. Tanay, Rahul Pandey, and Priya Singh of team Encipherers stood victorious. They came up with an android app named ‘NoZimers’ that helps Alzheimer’s patients maintain a detailed record of known persons and use facial recognition feature to identify the next time they meet them. They used Hypertrack api to send a location update to patient’s family and friends depending on location changes at specific time intervals. Finally, the SOAL scholarship was awarded to Aastha Gupta.
(Some last minute hacks and done!)
We owe the successful completion of Code-Off in a large part to our honored judges. Rightfully on the panel were, Kashyap Deorah, founder of Hypertrack; Sairee Chahal, founder of Sheroes; Tanmaya Jain, the young founder of inFeedo; Pingaksh Sharma — a digital marketing evangelist; Vishal Chandra , founder of Gluelabs; and finally one of our senior most members — Mala Gupta, writer of top selling Java certification books.
(Kashyap Deorah and his team with a participant)
As I mentioned before, our sole aim was to get more young women exposed to the thrilling world of tech. Nearly 40 women took part in Code-Off, and to us our goal was achieved when one of them came up to one of our team members and said, “this is my first hackathon and I don’t think I would be here if you hadn’t set that condition for having a female member [in the team] to participate.” One step at a time, we move ahead towards a more inclusive tech! Shoutout to Code-Off and for everyone who made it possible.
