Project Saadhna ~ Cycle 2 is complete!

Abirami Sukumaran

Published in

Google Cloud - Community

5 min readAug 9, 2024

A 2-Week Hack Marathon in July 2024

#ProjectSaadhna

“Saadhna’’ is a Sanskrit language word which means to practice (what you have learnt). In this program, empowered developers from Code Vipassana have the opportunity to practice their hands-on learning by participating in a 2-week marathon building their idea with Google Cloud.

Cycles

After every 2 seasons of Code Vipassana, we engage the developers in this hackathon style event. Currently after having successfully completed Gemini Code Assist and Data to generative AI with Google Cloud seasons, the developers of Code Vipassana were invited to submit their ideas for cycle 2 of Project Saadhna.

Cycle 2 Theme: Generative AI applications for real world data!

Services Engaged: Vertex AI (Gemini, Imagen, Embeddings APIs and SDKs), Cloud SQL, Firestore, Firebase, Google Maps API, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Agent Builder, BigQuery, MongoDB on Google Cloud and more.

Submission

250 ideas were submitted and 50 ideas were shortlisted based on their relevance, uniqueness, use of generative AI and databases and approach to problem solving! Shortlisted ideas were provisioned with 100$ Google Cloud Credits each and a duration of 2 weeks to build their idea.

The Build Phase

Code Vipassana core leads were supporting the selected ideas from day 0! They were providing guidance and clarity as when required, both in tech and the process areas. They held regular touchpoint meetings with the finalists and helped them take their idea to solution.

The Artifacts

This cycle, we have a standard blog template that the developers can use to accelerate their blog writing process after the implementation of their idea. Along with the implementation demo, the selected participants also created a blog, git hub repo and demo file artifacts for their ideas. Code Vipassana community leads were involved in this process as well.

Final Result

At the end of 2-week cycle, the ideas and the corresponding artifacts were submitted for evaluation. It was not an easy task this time to rate, score and rank the ideas. Each one was unique, complete and impactful in its own way. However we had to come up with a decision in terms of application of generative AI, use of Google Cloud services and the overall experience of implementation in 2-weeks to finalize the leaderboard!

🌻 250 Ideas Submitted
🔍 50 Ideas Shortlisted
💯11 Code Vipassana Leads
🚀27 Winning Solutions
🥇 7 in Top 5!
&
🚀🚀🚀 408 in developer activation!!!

Leaderboard

Cycle 2 Winners — TOP 5 (as you can see, top 5 wasn’t easy!)

Cycle 2 Winners List

Artifacts

The implementation details, blog and repo links to each of these ideas are available here:

googlecloud-indiacommunity-contributions/project-saadhna/2024/gen-ai-apps/README.md at main ·…

This repository is a collection of contributions that community members are making in the form of presentations at…

github.com

Congratulations to all the winners!

Project Saadhna Mentors

Seasoned Code Vipassana core leads help with the mentorship of participants for shortlisted ideas throughout this hack marathon. Thank you leads 🌻.

Ajoe Joseph
Akshay Bhopani
Anubhav Singh
Arkadyuti Paul
Bhaarat Krishnan
Karan Mittal
Kiran S Raj
Mohan Mahesh
Mohit Bhimrajka
Ruby Verma
Sarvesh Shashikumar
Vedant Pandya

You can find their details here.

Special Mention

Thank you Romin Irani for your continued support with community blog and repository publication effort!
Thank you Nithya Krishnan for creating the blog template for Project Saadhna blogs thereby accelerating the documentation process for the developers!

Yet another Saadhna is complete! Come back and join us for Code Vipassana Season 7 starting in September. Sign up here.