Project Ideas for Mumbai Hackathon 2019

Rushabh Mehta
3 min readMar 11, 2019

Dear Participants,

Thank you for signing up for the 4th Mumbai Hackathon! Conducted in collaboration with the amazing staff and students of Don Bosco Institute of Technology, Kurla, the hackathon has been an great success over the last three years.

Register at mumbaihackathon.in

The goal of the hackathon is simple:

Promote the Culture of Open Source

For us, we also get to talk about careers at Frappe and find out if there are people who match what we are expecting.

What to Build?

Over the years, we have observed that many participants are not clear about what they want to build. There are cash prizes worth Rs 50,000 to be won too, not to mention bragging rights for life.

Let me first start with what not to do:

Rule 1: Don’t use APIs

We have observed that many participants use APIs to build their products. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon give free access to student to build their applications using this APIs. Participants who make projects based on voice transcriptions, chatbots, cryptocurrencies etc usually end up using APIs for executing the hard parts.

The goal of these big companies is to make you addicted to their APIs, and this is against the goal of this hackathon, which is to promote open source.

Here are some things you can build

1. Open Source Alternatives to Apps You Use

Identify proprietary apps or services you use, can you make or setup an alternative? Here are some ideas:

  1. Search Engine (why not!)
  2. Launch a new Social Network (get 200 participants to sign up too!)
  3. A Ride Sharing App

2. Desktop Applications

Desktop applications based on Electron are a great new opportunity to write apps with great UX for desktop. Here are some ideas:

  1. Email Client
  2. Spreadsheets
  3. Rich Text Editors
  4. Backup / Password Managers
  5. Images / Photo Library

3. Bug fixes to Open Source Apps

If you are a user of any open source app, you can help it by identifying and fixing bugs. While you do this, you will learn about how to setup, build, deploy these tools.

4. Games and Simulations

Games are a fun to both play and build!

  1. FPS, puzzle, multi-player game. Use a gaming engine or make yours.
  2. Write an educational game for children / adult.
  3. Write a simulation for anything you are passionate about.

5. Design Projects

If you are a non developer, you can still participate!

  1. New Icon or Font set
  2. New Themes for popular CSS frameworks
  3. Redesign of popular open source tools

Open Hardware Projects are also Welcome!

You must be surprised that there is no AI/ML, crypto on the list, right? But we are sure some of you will end up doing this anways. If you are doing something in AI/ML, make sure you:

  1. Write your own models.
  2. Make a front-end.
  3. Build your own training data.

Looking forward to an amazing hackathon! Happy hacking 😊

Register at https://mumbaihackathon.in if you have already not.

--

--

Rushabh Mehta

founder, frappe | the best code is the one that is not written