HAH! That was fun, let’s do that again…
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.” — Albert Einstein
The statement that is quoted above is relatable, No? Well if you’ll ask any individual, who loves problem solving and has participated in any Hackathon, he will definitely say yes! Of course.
Speaking of me, this is Manish Virgat, right from the school of Computer Science and Engineering, Lovely Professional University and buckle up guys as I’m going to share my experience of participating in my first ever hackathon.
According to Oxford, Hackathon is an event at which a large number of people work together developing computer programs, usually over several days, I would take the carte blanche to add ‘to solve a real-life problem’ to this statement.
Coming to the hackathon, the name of the first hackathon I participated was AUTUMN HACKS and it was organised in partnerships of four communities, DSC LPU, DSC DAVIET, Mozilla Punjab and GirlScript Jalandhar. When I got to know about the hackathon the euphoria of participating into it was really good. This was my first semester and wanted to do something that would enrich my knowledge and wanted to learn things, so I participated into it and man! Believe me that was hell lot of fun.
So, to begin, let me be honest you and say that I honestly knew nothing about what hackathon is all about, but the things that internet and my beloved seniors explained me. For a start, we made a team of 4 that consisted of great enthusiasts and I really had an inferiority complex whenever I talked to them and making me as if I was a dilettante and I was like, “What am I gonna do there, I don’t know anything” but they supported me saying this is not about knowing things already, it’s about learning new things. I took the privilege of naming my team ‘Immortals’ (Please don’t ask why). The shock came to us that day when the conformation mail came and we got to know that one teammate of ours was not selected and hence we were reduced to 3 members. We kept our preparation going, hoping to do something that could catch the attention of people there.
12th October’19, the day finally came and we three peeps got ready with laptops and other stuffs in our bags and dreams in our eyes. As we were sitting in the waiting room, we were merged with two members and that made our team of full five members and each one was an elan. There was an expression of angst on everyone’s face (Since this was the first hackathon for every member of our team). The charisma of the hall with hundreds of people and many teams was such a joy. The volunteers were pulling their own weights and worked tirelessly during the whole event. The participants too, worked in tandem. Then came the first round, the problem statement round, basically what we were supposed to do is to submit a problem and explain the solution to the judge. We submitted a problem that was based on educational field, and explained him how are we planning to solve this problem. And with this, the main event kick started. We had our lunch and started the development part.
It was all coding and the designing part till the midnight when we happened to face a serious issue. The login page that we created was not accepting any more responses and at this moment we knew that we messed up. We took help from all sources and unfortunately, we couldn’t fix it. And this shattered all our dreams. But, we somehow managed to bypass that issue and were able to solve that problem temporarily.
Now, the time was 6 AM, 13th October’19. The aurora over the rising sun is quite a beautiful scene to look for, and the thing that added icing on the cake was the continuous whole night effort made by our team. The dark spot underneath our eyes, the messy hairs, the frowned looks said it all. We finally completed our project and explained it to the jury members.
And for the final segment, the result section, we were not able to win any prize but happy for our fellow mate who bagged the first prize (Believe me, he was a fresher too!). They say participating is more valuable than winning and I realized it that day, it was when I thought that at least I have gained something known as experience and that will help me throughout my life.
I would definitely like to thank all the organizers, the volunteers to come up with this grand event and helped many noobs like me. Really blessed to be a part of that. And for the upcoming event, I would love to be a part and enrich my knowledge.
Now, to conclude this whole I would just wrap this by saying, hah! it was fun, let’s do that again!
-MANISH VIRGAT
