We have our first ever Hackathon, Build for India

Today our Noida office held an exciting hackathon. Teams of students, engineers and developers across the country came together and worked really hard to design and code their own new product/service in 36 hours.

While we regularly engage with the developer community, this is the first time we have done it at such scale. Hundreds participated in today’s code fest to build smart solutions uniquely relevant for India. The idea is simple — developers should be able to focus on what they do best and the Paytm payments API will take care of the payments side.

A dedicated online group was created for official announcements, discussions and for anyone interested in finding potential partners. Our mentor Prashant Singh was around the entire time, guiding participants through each step.

Participants were handed over staging credentials, links to download SDKs and Plugins and the complete set of API documents. Every contestant received Digital Ocean Credits worth $15. After quick introductions to Paytm Payment APIs by Product team members — Prerna, Vidya and Keyur, the contest kicked off. Heaps of code started being uploaded to GitHub.

Top Paytm officials Vipin Surelia, Lomesh Dutta and Prashant Singh were around as mentors. The good folks at AWS dropped by to offer mentoring sessions and distributed $100 free credits to several teams. Coffee, Coke and Red Bull was on the house. The hot Indian lunch and Pizzas for dinner helped hackathonians refuel. We had nice music playing and cosy mattresses ready to help participants relax.

Lomesh Gupta, Vice President — Business at Paytm was around till late at night, guiding youngsters. He said, “I’m very impressed by what I see. We have some really great teams of developers building compelling solutions.” He added: “In a country with 1.2 billion people there is always the possibility of making great things happen. Our intent here is to help build more use-cases that enable seamless payments across sectors.”

Hackathons are amazing. They are both competitive and collaborative. While techies battle to win recognition (and gifts), it allows people from different product teams across the country to come together, get to know each other and build good stuff together.

Tomorrow’s the Grand Finale guys. Stay tuned and keep developing!