RPATOOLS HACKATHON — THE TOIL AND TRIUMPH

A proof of happiness gained when my expectations met reality!

The RPATools Hackathon 2021 was miraculous and incredible for me. This hackathon was a platform for intermediate-level developers to showcase their skills and served as a head-start for our careers. The hackathon was unique by all means, especially in the criteria and prizes.

The hackathon comprised of 4 steps:

• Registration
• Online proctored test & shortlisting,
• Use case Submission & Shortlisting, and
• Finale.

There were 1000+ registrations. Out of those around 200 were selected for the next round. 28 best use cases were selected for the Hackathon Finale which was held on March 5–6, 2022.

I was very excited when I saw this opportunity posted in an RPA WA group by Mrs Pavithra TR (RPA Trainer). I attended the proctored online qualification test and got shortlisted for the next round. I did lots of research and brainstorms before drafting out a project plan to be done, executed, and submitted. There arose so many doubts and uncertainties, but I was able to manage them with some amount of my wit I had already. I was running behind many UiPath documentations and repositories to figure out if my idea was already in use. My idea was not a duplicate of any entity which was already in the market.

The problem statement I was trying to solve was under the Business Agility domain. I decided to solve the data overloaded problems in various sectors like E-commerce, Travel & Accommodation, Movies/Entertainment, and Education. My idea tried to solve the elimination of manual work to read the comments posted by a company’s product users. In addition to these, I planned to create automation models for Invoice processing, Live Share price Updates and Customer Query Processing which would be useful for every domain to improve their business to meet customers’ requirements.

My idea was actually to create a UiPath App with all the above-mentioned services. I opted to use the UiPath packages out-of-the-box which were really accurate as per the best-trained models used widely. I created UiPath processes in the studio and deployed them in the orchestrator. This project is completely based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I named my use case “Sentiment Analysis and Product Development”. I named my app “CRITIC SPY” since the primary work of this application is to spy on the criticisms and reviews posted by the customers.

I perfectly followed Software Engineering principles this time to create this project. I have listed them down below:

1. Requirement Analysis
2. Planning/Design
3. Construction/Coding
4. Testing
5. Deployment

As the first step, I fully understood what the judging criteria actually was. The various scoring hints were :

• Ideation 10% — We will evaluate your idea and how it adds value.
• Completion 30% — As per ideation, whether you have completed the project.
• Technology 20% — how effectively you have used UiPath products to achieve it.
• Presentation 30% — how well you present your solution in the final judging round.
• Implementation 10% — project based on implementation readiness in real life.

Eventually, I designed a solution use-case diagram from which I derived the project architecture. As the next step, I started to build the process and integrated it with the UiPath Cloud. After that, I surrounded them with Exception handling blocks. I tested it by running the whole system with diverse inputs and links. After performing all these steps I published my app to be run.

I was perfectly ready with all the presentations, and execution videos and my app was demo-ready! I was given 20 mins to demonstrate my solution to the problem. I gave the presentation without any technical or vocal glitch and something great happened after that. I was taken aback and elated to hear the judge's comments, which were unexpected and fantabulous. My heart was jumping from top to bottom when they said

“This is not a project, but a product!”

They also commented on my execution as a power-packed use-case demonstration. They also assured me that I could expect some good results for my efforts in this hackathon.

I waited, fingers crossed for a week. And on March 13, 2022, around 2pm, the results were released. With my mother and sister on either side, with great enthusiasm, I shouted that I won first place and showed them the results poster. I was also presented with a wonderful certificate and cash prizes. The management, Trainer, and all who were associated with this hackathon were very joyful. I

This hackathon was close to my heart the tremendous win that I secured was the icing on the cake!

From 1000+, to 200+ to 28 to 1. The journey was simply exhilarating!