The journey from a Rookie to Hacker: Hackathon experience at Hackout’20
“ Experience: Universal Mother of Sciences ”
Introduction
Hello Amigos!! Myself Tejas Agrawal (alias: cyber-venom003), an open-source enthusiast from the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad. I recently participated with 3 of my teammates in Hackout’20, a 36-hour national level online hackathon conducted by Headout. This was the first hackathon experience of my life which was really the best experience I’ve got till now in my professional life. So let’s get started.
Pre-Hackathon Planning
I got to know about hackathon through an e-mail from my college technical society, GeekHaven. I thought about my existing skills and decided that this would be the right time to start this. I went to the website of Hackout and joined the Discord server of the hackathon. Before teaming up with anyone, I ensured from organizers, on Discord, if the hackathon is an open track or it has some problem statements. I contacted one of my friends, Divyansh Rai, a pro-Kaggler and AI-ML enthusiast from my college itself for teaming up in the hackathon. We decided to make a team of 4 members, so he further contacted Aditya Raj, another AI-ML enthusiast, and Avneesh Kumar, a Flutter developer, and open source enthusiasts, both from our college.
At last, we got an efficient team of 4 members named “Cyber Symbiotes” and we started to think out of the box: about an idea that is something, useful for the masses. And then, there was a light bulb moment among us: Aditya Raj came up with an idea of a healthcare application to increase the efficiency of the medical architecture of India. We decided to build a cross-platform application that will take symptoms from users and will predict the probable diseases, and suggest to them the recommended tests. Moreover, users can upload the test results and the app would give them the risk and severity of the disease. Finally, we all decided to work upon this and started planning the workflow of the application.
Aditya Raj and Divyansh started their research on the Deep Learning Algorithms for disease detection using MRI Scans and Chest X-Rays, while I and Avneesh started our research on the implementation of AI in flutter applications.
6th November 2020: Day 0 of Hackathon
The hackathon started at 3:00 PM and by that time, Aditya and Divyansh managed to make the deep learning models of best accuracy to detect Brain Tumor, Pneumonia, and Covid-19. We all made a rough plan to commit and push timings of the project on Github so that we can work efficiently without much hassle and problems. The hackathon started with a talk given by Rachit Watts sir, VP Engineering in Headout. They explained about the work culture and life at Headout and his talk motivated me and my team to work efficiently with enthusiasm so that we can win and may get an internship opportunity at Headout.
After the speaker talks, we attended the Speaker AMA sessions to ask about their professional experiences which further motivated all of us to work upon. By the end of the day, I and Avneesh managed to make a dummy database of diseases mapped with their symptoms and recommended tests and hosted it on a cloud (Google Firebase). I implemented the feature of getting the probable diseases from the symptoms input given by the user till the end of day 0 itself. At night, before sleeping, we planned how to proceed with the project further in the next day on Discord Voice Channel.
7th November 2020: Day 1 of Hackathon
On day 1, we all started in the morning at 9 AM as we planned everything one night before. Avneesh started to work upon the feature of recommending tests on the basis of disease. On 7th Nov, there was my end semester exam of college which was a barrier to our hackathon progress, but I managed to dodge it(thanks to the online semester, xD).
By the afternoon, Avneesh managed to implement the disease to tests feature and 65% work of the application was completed. After that, mentors of the hackathon started the mid reviews of projects and our mid review was taken by Aakash Goel sir, engineering manager at Headout. He was impressed by our work momentum and wished us the best for further. Now, the remaining work was to integrate the deep learning models with our flutter application and none of us knew anything about MLOps. So all of us started to research the best frameworks which could provide us ML Deployment. Divyansh tried it using Streamlit library of python, Aditya tried it using Django and I started to research over Flask, a micro web framework written in Python. I googled things, searched over StackOverflow to know how this ML Deployment stuff works. After 4 hours of much hassle, finally, at the end of the day at 12 AM, I managed to make a local Flask server and tested it using a sample web app.
8th November 2020: Final Day of Hackathon
My day 2 started in continuity with day 1. As I was exploring the MLOps stuff, I didn’t sleep and tried to deploy my local Flask server on Heroku, but after the much hassle of 3 hours, all my efforts of mine went in vain. Hence, I started to integrate the local Flask Server with my flutter app.
Date: 8th November, Time: 5 AM IST, the dawn of the morning. Integration of local flask server with flutter app was successful, all testing checks were successful but, I ended up with eye fatigue and the app “Swasthyam” was completed. I notified all team members and they saw a celebration moment in the morning itself.
After that, I slept at 6 AM for 4 hours to relax, as I was having another exam at 11 AM. In the morning, mentors scheduled the final reviews at 11 AM, but due to my exams, I and my team requested mentors to take the final review of our project after my exams.
Finally, after my exam, our final review was taken by Ekansh Bansal sir, an intern at Headout. Firstly, they asked about our idea, which was explained by Aditya very well. He defended every cross-question of Ekansh sir in a very nice way. After that, Divyansh explained the ML and DL implementation in the project and I explained the MLOps and flutter application. Finally, after 30 mins, Ekansh sir wishes us all the best and we turned our eyes towards the #announcements channel in the discord server and waited for results.
All of my team members had butterflies in their stomachs and all of us were holding the breath to see the top 9 teams shortlisting. All of our fingers were crossed until…..
Cyber Symbiotes appeared nowhere in the top 9 shortlists. All of my team members were struck numb that why we weren’t shortlisted. After the shortlisting, we headed over to the YouTube live stream to see the presentations of the projects of the top 9 teams.
After getting disqualified, we just motivated each other not to get depressed and thought over why we weren’t shortlisted. We were just happy that we got a wonderful experience in our professional life and decided that we’ll always team up for any hackathon. Finally, there was an end to the exciting journey of 3 days which gave me a wonderful working experience under timed constraints and a fair knowledge of MLOps.
Lessons I learned during Hackout 2020
Hackout 2020 results taught me many lessons from the mistakes we committed as a team during the hackathon time period. I’m listing them here so that readers might learn from my experience to get an even better experience than mine:
- Don’t ever think that you are just making a working prototype of your idea. Just keep working on the project and try to make it better and better until the last hour of your time range.
- Try your best to make your working project live and open to all, i.e. deploy it on some cloud service. This would give a nice impression to anyone to whom you’re presenting the app.
- Commit and push to the version control system at each and every milestone of the project. Believe me, it is very necessary to track your progress and it is a very nice preventive measure if you fuck up something in between development.
- UI and UX of your project are as equally important as other aspects of your project because they are the very first things anyone sees before the core implementations of your project and as they say “First Impression is the last impression”. Hence your team should always contain a great designer.
- Testing is very necessary at each and every milestone of your project development. While testing, you should think like a layman that what a user can do and what fuck ups can occur while the real-world usage of an app by a layman user. Before completion, you should try to clear all of the loopholes in your development phase only.
Links to Project
Drop a star on the Github repository if you like it, any improvement suggestions are welcomed as Github issues.
