First ever Hackathon Experience, DevJams’19 at VIT.
So, I finally attended my first ever hackathon, organised in my college. Yay me! I have been waiting a long time to finally get this chance to write my blog post on a hackathon that I have attended. The time has finally come. This post will be revolving around the wonderful experience I had at the event, the things I learnt and the experience gained.
I am currently studying Masters in Computer Application from Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. The Google Developers Student Club chapter at VIT, organised the first ever DevJams, a 36 hours hackathon, within the campus. I didn’t expect, that my first hackathon would span for this long, but you just cannot miss the chance. When the announcements were done a month ago, I was already on my feet, trying to find a team. Contacted a few of the batch mates, spoke to some of them who have already attended hackathons and finally approached two of my friends to team up. Prashant Dhirendra and Raja Parivesh, two of the very talented guys with lots of experience.
Next came the phase of idea submission. We needed to decide upon an idea and submit it for evaluation. If the idea is interesting enough, it will be accepted and subsequently result in the selection of the team for the hackathon. So we initially decided upon an idea that was worth presenting. But being unsure, we spoke with some of the members of the DSC Community about it. We found that the idea, that is to be submitted, should directly affect any one of the themes, that were listed in the website. And we were back to square one. With limited time in our hand, we searched through the themes given and tried to come up with new ideas. Until finally, we found the one: An app for indoor navigation of the huge buildings at the VIT campus, not very innovative though! But, there peeped in a problem. None of us were well versed in any app development. So, there we were, blindly hitting at an unknown target. Now, for the obvious solution, we needed someone with experience in any app development. And, its not difficult to find Android developers in any institute. Time to add one more member to the team. Shivam Gupta eagerly agreed to work with us on the project. There we were the four of us. Oh sorry! Three of us. Yes, somehow Prashant forgot to accept the team invitation before deadline.
So, there we were, the three of us, at the doors of the ground floor gallery at Technology Tower in the campus. Team RandomConstants entering the arena (trumpets blowing in the background!). Two of us, with very little knowledge of Android Programming, the other with a lot of experience in it. And then, there was me, super excited to enter the first ever hackathon. No, I am not gonna bore you with every details of our experience at the hackathon. Even I read blogs like this and get bored sometime. However, I am gonna mention a few events.
So, after some initial rounds of hacking, we had an initial Review 1 at 10:30 in the next morning. By that time, we had figured out only 30% of the app we were building. We were able to integrate ARCore Sceneform into our app. The app would build from Android Studio, opening directly with the camera in our mobile. The app will then detect a plane that would then help it place a 3D model on it. Now, it looked very difficult to me at first, but by the time we were there for the first review, we were there able to achieve an initial goal. Me, who have never built an Android app before was standing with a little working app in my laptop. I cannot describe the feeling at that very moment. Many developers might find it silly, but I felt quite the same way one might have felt when they successfully build their first app. I realized that the simple trick was efficient Google Search and understanding from the documentations, how each of the modules worked and interacted among themselves.
The next few hours went on with more coding and interacting with people. I remember the instance, where we were stuck with a problem. We were able to place a 3D model on the plane, but the model would not show. We were only able to see its shadow. Luckily, just before that, we had a speaker session, where we had Sachin Kumar, an Google Developer Expert. He was helping out the teams with the problems. We decided to approach him for help. The next few minutes, when we interacted with him, were the best moments of the whole Hackathon. He calmly listened to our problem, went through our code, that was mostly scrambled, and offered various solution. All these at very late hours, probably past midnight (, yes! we lost track of time). After around five or ten minutes, we finally figured out the error. On rectifying the version of sceneform being loaded, the app started working just fine.
At around 5:30 in the evening of 21st of October, we were ready for our Review 2, an elimination round. From here, only a few teams would qualify for the final round. A little tensed, we were there with our app. Sadly, it was not complete yet. We were having problems with retrieving data from Firebase, that would finally be displayed in the user’s phone. We, surfed through the Internet for a solution but just couldn’t find any. But, the reviewers made our day. They heard our progress, listened to our problems and discussed various solutions that can be applied to solve them. At that very moment, I was amazed at their suggestion on how you can tackle a problem in various other ways. We forgot that it was a Review session and interacted with them more like as if they are mentoring us right now.
Sadly, we didn’t make it to the final round. There were teams ready with a fully working model, pitching their ideas. But we were not disappointed. We learnt so much within the 24 hours of our stay. With only 1 hour of sleep and over 15 hours of continuous coding, I might have been very tired, but the fun I had learning new things, listening to the excellent line of speakers and interacting with other people was way above all the tiredness and I am never gonna forget it. I had the privilege to listen to Nikita Gandhi, Project Coordinator for EngEDU’s ML Program at Google, Sashank Barki, Data Engineer at Manhattan Associates, Sachin Kumar, Google Developer Expert, Rohan Mishra, Product Designer at Zomato and others. Getting to know the wonderful DSC team here and the coolest Community Lead, Samarth Nayyar, has been an additional reward for attending DevJams’19.
This has been one of the best experience of my life. I hope to attend many more hackathons in future but none of them will ever be able to take the place of this first one ever :)
Live Long and Code.
