Hackathon Chronicles — Part 1
It all started at a college fest
This is the story of my first Hackathon, which was held at MSIT, New Delhi on 2nd February, 2016, where Hardeep Singh Mehra and Ashish Gulati and I won the 2nd Prize.
But before all that, a little backstory of how the three of us ended up participating together in the first place.
First Internship
It was sometime during February of 2015, when one of my friends told me about the IIT-Delhi Open House, and annual event where students exhibit the various projects they are working on.
One such fellow was Mr. Somit Pangtey, a final year student from IIT-Delhi who, along with some of his friends had started-up just a few month before the event.
But that was not important at this point of time.
At the time, he was showcasing a project he was working on, which drew our attention to him in the first place. We had some nice conversations, learned some basics about Game Development and well, made a new friend.
Little did we know, this meeting was going to change our lives.
Fast forward to 13th June, 2 days after our last exam of the second semester, that we get a message from him, asking if we would like to interview for an internship at his startup.
And so we went up to meet him the next day, and viola! We just landed our first internship, and during the course of the next 3 months, we learned to make 3D Games and Augmented Reality Apps using Unity3D.
And thats how Team MonoDevelopers was born.
Back to the first day of the Hackathon, we arrived at the venue along with some more of our friends from college (shoutout to Amanjeet Singh and Asif Ansari), not knowing what to expect.
There were various tracks for us to hack upon, including Education, e-commerce, Travel, Finance, etc.
After about an hour of brainstorming various ideas, we finalized to build an app on the Education track.
The Idea
Throughout schools in India, we have these INR 2 colored ‘charts’ that have a collage of stock images of some kind, like Monuments of India, or Animals of India, etc. that students mostly use as cutouts for school projects.
We felt that with millions of these pages available in stationery shops all over the country, and with almost every household having at least one smartphone today, a better user-experience can be built with these existing tools, which might even make learning fun for kids at a young age.
The final goal was to make a mobile Augmented reality app, wherein different kind of rich media would be overlaid on top of the the print pages, based on the content — for example, if the page was different types of land animals, over each animal we would overlay a 3D model of the animal, the sound it makes, what it eats, etc.
And we sat down to work.
Problems Galore
The first hurdle was the poor internet connectivity at the venue. Moreover, we could not get proper mobile internet signal to penetrate the walls of the auditorium we were made to sit in.
And so, for the next couple of hours, Ashish and Hardeep started looking for ways for somehow find and download the various assets (3D model of animals, monuments, etc.) while I tried to figure out how the app would work.
It was around 3 PM, almost 5 hours since the hackathon had commenced, that we learned how the interactions would be made with the objects in AR. All that was left was to start with the code.
Aaaaaaaaaaand, this is where we got stuck.
No amount of google searches helped us figure out why this one key thing was not working. We asked one of our mentors who was an experienced Unity3D developer, but even he could not be of much help to us.
At 6 PM, the organizers asked us to leave the hall, as the college authorities didn’t allow for an overnight hackathon, and we would have to come back tomorrow for the 2nd day.
By this point we lost all hope.
We were unsure whether we would be able to even build a demo in time or not, and half decided to not come back tomorrow. And so, we went roaming around the campus to see other fun activities for the rest of the evening.
Once I reached home, I sat down to take one final look at the project, in hope to somehow figure out the issue.
After grinding for almost 3 hours, I FINALLY figured it out. What furiated me even more was the simplicity of the solution.
The next day, we reached the venue at 9 AM on a freezing winter morning, 5 mins before the organizers reached themselves, confident that we’ll be able to complete a working demo in time for presentations.
After a hectic 6 hours of constantly coding and testing cycles, it was time to present.
This was our first time presenting at a hackathon, and we were quite nervous.
We rehearsed a little bit, spread out who will present what, how and when, and walked towards the stage.
Here’s something I’ve learnt after almost 15 hackathon participations, no matter how much you practise beforehand, your presentation will never go as planned.
And that’s exactly what happened.
We presented very poorly, jumping from one thing to another and we felt like our idea didn’t come across towards the jury.
We were so pissed off that we just packed our bags, and sat in different corners of the room, just waiting for the results to be announced so we could go home.
However…
When the result were announced, we could not believe that we had secured the 2nd position. To add to that, our friends from college grabbed the first position, putting the cherry on top.
And it was that day, Team MonoDevelopers hit first blood.
We won some cash prize, and a couple of goodies including a wireless mouse that I use even today.
Cool story bro, whats the point.
If you can takeaway anything from this story, it would be this — Go that extra mile.
Had I not looked at the problem again after getting back home the first day, I probably would have overslept the next morning, and might not have went to the venue the next day, and won’t have stood a chance to win the next day.
And maybe, I would have not participated in the next hackathon, or the next one, or the one after that.
Those few more hours of hard work that day, changed my life forever.
When I look back at February 4, 2016, I don’t think about the fun I had, or the prizes I won.
It is a reminder of what some seemingly small things we do in life, can make a huge difference in the long run.
And so, the moral of the story is — Go that extra mile, study for those 2 more hours, work that extra shift at the office, spend time finishing that seemingly unimportant thing.
You never know where life may take you.
If you made it this far, Thank You. I hope you had your time’s worth while reading it. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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