Our First Hackathon Experience
Firsts are always special, indeed! This experience of ours has definitely become a memorable one for us.
It was March 2021, a phase where everyone is making projects, participating in hackathons and improving their problem solving skills. My teammate and I were also working on improving our skills and what could be better than learning by implementation! And so we were actively looking for hackathons in which we could participate.
We tried looking for hackathons on various sites online but couldn’t find one. However, on one fine evening a notification popped up and we got our first wonderful opportunity.
The Myntra Hackerramp WeForShe - an opportunity open for all the Female Students in Tech.
After a moments’ discussion, we registered for the same and were really excited and nervous at the same time, but in a good way because it was a fear we wanted to face.
Phases Of The Hackathon
Myntra is a major Indian fashion e-commerce company and through this hackathon, it was looking for solutions to problems of online shopping and to improve customer satisfaction. Unlike other hackathons, this one was quite a long one and spanned across more than 4 weeks with 4 phases. Let us walk you through each phase.
Phase 1: Ideation
There were 5 themes and each team could work on 1 or 2 themes. In this phase, we really had to get our creative juices flowing and come up with an idea that could be a feasible and efficient solution to the problem.
The themes were as follows :
- Theme 1: Collaborative Shopping
Developing an idea so that customers could shop together online - Theme 2: Size and Fit
The problem of improper fitting of clothes and customer dissatisfaction - Theme 3: Accelerate
Speed. How can customers find the product they want faster and with ease. - Theme 4: Customer Delight
To figure out innovative ways to enhance the user shopping experience. - Theme 5: Seamless Online/Offline retail
Managing digital information about your business and figuring out ways to discover offline inventory and nearest stores.
After hours of discussion and moving back and forth and reading the entire PPT of themes a myriad of times, we could filter out the theme we had to work on! And that was Theme 2 — Size And Fit.
The entire problem statement is as follows:
“One of the biggest challenges online fashion faces is the large volume of returns. According to a survey from Body Labs, 23% of all clothing gets returned, and 64% of consumers say incorrect fit is the primary reason they return clothing.
Size and Fit is a multidimensional problem influenced by various factors like inconsistency in size chart across brands, different body types and Individual fit choices.
- Let’s devise innovative ways to help shoppers find the apparel that fits; turning moments of hesitation in online apparel shopping into confidence & purchase.
- Let’s build solutions like virtual try-ons to help customers visualize how the apparel looks on them.”
Now, although we had finalized our theme, the solution was yet to be discovered. After days of scratching our heads and pondering over several feasible solutions finally
We had our Eureka Moment!
Our idea was based on a real life scenario wherein we use our old clothes to find the new one which has the same fit.
So we decided to develop a Mobile Application for the same which uses an Unsupervised Machine Learning model for size prediction.
After we had submitted our idea we were really unsure of our further qualification because our idea’s implementation was not straightforward and was a bit tedious for some to understand if not explained.
To our mere surprise, we received a mail that stated that our idea had been shortlisted. We jumped out of joy, because out of the 6245 teams who had registered, there were around 170 teams that had been shortlisted for the implementation phase.
Now, it was time to bring our idea to life!
What did we submit in phase 1? Our Idea in the form of a ppt
Phase 2: Implementation
This is where ideas had to come to life. Now we knew what we had to achieve, but how was still a question mark.
There were 2 of us and we had divided our role as follows
- App developer, to develop the frontend in Flutter
- ML developer, to develop the backend
We had around 8 days to finish our task and develop a working model. Initially, we took our task casually because the deadlines were being postponed due to varied reasons . It wasn’t two days before the submission date that we really started to work.
Both of us had zero knowledge of each other’s domain and so we had to explain the problem and our requirements to each other in most layman terms. The last two days were full of calls, restless coding and we had successfully converted this long hackathon into the traditional one of 30 hours.
30 hours of calls, discussions, coding, celebrations — when we could correct errors, one sleepless night and the result — our idea was now a fully functional model. At around 10 am in the morning we had finally submitted our app.
We were satisfied and really happy with our performance and we were eagerly waiting for the result of the implementation phase.
The results of the implementation phase were delayed and after we had lost all hopes and were busy with our daily academic routine, to our surprise one evening we got a call that our team had been selected for the pre-finale round.
What did we submit in phase 2? Our fully functioning app(frontend) and size predicting model(backend)
Phase 3: Pre Finale
Now, as pre-finalists we had already unlocked an opportunity — an opportunity to bag the summer internship at Myntra through PPI(Pre Placement Interview). Pre-Finale round was going to be difficult as we now had to manage our End semester examinations that were just a week away and also perform well here.
In the pre-finale round, each team had been assigned a mentor that would provide us with valuable inputs to improve our model and then we had to present this model to the esteemed jury. The shortlisted teams from this round would then move to the Grand Finale Round.
We had a meet with our mentor and we decided to improve some of the features of our application according to his suggestion.
An entire week was now being spent on making improvements and improvising the entire app. This one week was again very hectic with some stubborn errors eating up all of our mind and energy.
Finally, the day had arrived when we had to present our app to the esteemed jury. We were successful in inculcating the new features but destiny had some other plans for us. Minutes before our presentation the laptop on which the server was running, hanged(and since we were operating in an online mode due to Covid we had no backup). Somehow we began by showing the PPT that we had created and started to explain our idea and implementation, but we were running out of the time that had been allotted to us and we were unable to demonstrate our app live.
We both were saddened by this and we knew that our journey had come to a halt here. Without any further ado, we religiously started preparing for the end semester examinations. Although somewhere in our minds there was still a section that was comfortable in believing that — what if there was a chance, what if some miracle happens and we get shortlisted?
What had to be submitted in phase 3? A live demonstration of our App
Phase 4: Grand Finale?
Out of the 32 teams, only the top 7 teams made it to the Grand Finale and unfortunately we were not one of them. But as every coin has two sides, even we found our positive side.
The Finalists had to present their work to the jury and out of the 7 teams, 3 winners were declared.
Our learnings
- Always keep backup — Make sure that every member of your team has all the tools and tech stack required to present the project at an individual level.
- Ask for Help — Several times we just hesitate in asking for help and spend hours and days trying to solve the errors on our own. If help is available, do not hesitate, you will definitely grab some value out of it.
- Be Patient — Patience is the key to overpower the mulish errors. There are tons of breakdown moments where it feels like giving up but believing in yourself and working for the eureka moments is much more rewarding.
- Googling — googling and finding your perfect solution amongst millions of web pages is again a skill in itself and this experience definitely helped us to polish our googling skills.
The entire experience was a roller-coaster ride. From sometimes not being able to solve a basic error to implementing a whole project, we learnt how to find solutions to our problems. From working alone to learning how to work in team we had gained an important professional skill.
The cherry on the cake — One of us was offered the Summer Internship at Myntra after conducting two rounds of interviews. All in all there was a lot to gain from this experience. Looking forward to many like these.
You can check out our project here.
