Did I Make-A-Ton?
2020 was in it’s last quarter, and I had spent more than a year as a computer science student in CUSAT, attending tech talks where I had presented myself as a beginner for around 12 months wondering when I would actually get started in the field. And then seeing a post shared on social media, I decided to give my first hackathon a go. I registered for Make-A-Ton 2020. Initially this was mostly because I was promised a T-shirt!
We made a team of 5, and most of the others were beginners too. First we tried to do a mock project to see how to work together using git and GitHub. We made a blog application as our sample project and I did the profile page for the blog. Though I took a lot of time understanding several html tags and spent a considerable amount of time watching YouTube tutorials, the design didn’t look that great, but I started anyway. I was finally working on something.
Within 4 days, our blog app named “F-logs” was working , and that instilled mixed emotions in me. I was very happy that the blog app worked as expected but I realized that it wasn’t that difficult to get started, and I regretted not registering for any hackathons before. So for all those people who are thinking “How to get started?”, please start now, because I regret the time I wasted procrastinating.
It was a two day hackathon and we thought about building an anonymous messaging app like Yik Yak. But then we wanted it to serve a purpose. So we changed it to an anonymous question answer application like Reddit and Quora. We planned to add features like that of Instagram too along with it so that it we hope it’ll create popularity among college students.
We worked on the front end part of the app and we named it “Redqugram”. But after our first milestone check, we changed the idea because nobody wanted something that already existed. The judges asked us to be specific to what our purpose was. The challenge was to add voice integration.
So we created an app where you could simply ask questions and you get your answers through voice so that it would help even blind people to access the app services like we do.
We named it “Findeth” because my teammate reminded us of the saying — “those who seeketh findeth”. While the pandemic made us all stay home, online classes continued. We needed a community to ask, answer and rate the answers given by students. So we made it an anonymous question answer session, so that nobody would fear about being rated by their question. Moreover the answers could be upvoted and downvoted by anybody and the answer with a certain number of downvotes are automatically removed so that we get good answers.
After the second milestone check, the judges accepted it and we needed to present it. So we changed the logo of Redqugram and edited the front end, adding voice integration using Alan AI. When all was completed, we filled the google form they provided with our working video of the app. They said selected teams would be informed and they would have to do a live pitching in front of the judges. I thought all was done and that other teams would have better experiences and would have worked with better projects so there was no way that ours would be selected. But I had underestimated our project. We got selected to the top 10! Now we had to do a live pitching.
As per the instructions given we added things like:
unique selling point
the target market
the revenue model
the existing problem and the solution through our app.
We made the presentation as simple as possible, and pitched it to the judges. We were not selected to the top 3, but we learnt a lot of things and I had done my first pitching! The excitement and the tension gave a mixed emotion but at the end I felt more than happy to have done something new.
I was glad that the T-shirt was not the only thing that I took away with me after Make-A-Ton 2020.
I had learnt a ton of new things and gained a memorable experience, which I’m sure I would have missed out on, had I not attended this wonderful hackathon!
