This article is about the first overnight Hackathon I attended as team Pseudo Automata with members Debdut Goswami, Aniket Mitra, Sayan Kundu and myself.
What is a Hackathon in the first place?
An idea makes an entrepreneur, but a smart financial sense builds a successful entrepreneur. 'Hackathon' comprises two words: 'Hack', which means doing clever programming and 'Marathon', which marks an event of endurance. It is a competition where participants try and use technology to hack into real-world problems.
It is often told to be a 'social coding' event that brings young and bright computer programmers together to contribute to the digital revolution. With risk management, trading, investing, personal finance, Big Data, retail banking, regulatory compliance, mobile payments and enterprise social as some of the heads.
The Hackathon will stimulate the participants to innovate and apply their knowledge, creativity, and competitive coding skills to solve the given problem before the other contestants do. Big business starts small with apps doing all the work and the talk nowadays.
About this Hackathon:
The Hackathon was scheduled to commence from 29th February morning at 10 A.M and go on for 30 long hours. There were two primary topics to work on, "Smart Traffic Management" and "Blood Bank on the Move". We decided to work on the topic "Blood Bank on the Move" with the problem statement being:
Blood Bank donation systems can collect blood from many donors in short from various sources and distribute that blood to needy people who require blood. To do all this we require high quality Web Application to manage those jobs. Online Blood Bank management system is to provide services for the people who are in need of blood by getting help from the donors who are interested in donating blood for the people.
Before it, all began...
A week ago, Debdut called me up to ask if I was interested to join them on the project for this Hackathon and told me his plan about this. Aniket and Sayan too came on board and now we were planning how to execute this project. Sayan was already a Flutter Developer and Debdut was ready to develop the backend, Aniket was into Web Development but was primarily working on bug hunting so I was asked to help him out in frontend although later I found that he was already well equipped with it. We got into the planning of the work process and went on to make the preparation, setting up the backend servers, making APIs and making a basic format of our web page as well as the application. The day before the event we were very tensed thinking of how to make everything work and we were going in with zero hopes for any position in this competition.
Finally, the day arrived...
We had to get up early and board the train around 6 o'clock in the morning. The registration process was supposed to start at 9 and it was later extended up till 11. The inauguration ceremony commenced from 11:30, respected Professors and a representative from HERE Technologies gave an inspiring speech to get the event started. The place we were given was divided into two parts by sliding doors, one was a hall full of chairs and another was a room full of mattresses for us to rest. We chose to work on chairs for the first half and then during the night we would shift to the mattresses to rest for a while. There were 26+ teams and with two projects to choose from, things were way more competitive.
Before going in there, Debdut had planned out and set up the servers to work on and Aniket had prepared a prototype for the website, Sayan was yet to start his work on the mobile application. More than the technical issues, at the beginning we were anxious because we were about to experience something new. We walked around the Jadavpur Campus to get some fresh air and also to avoid getting all stressed out because taking unnecessary stress would cloud negatively. We started slow but we caught a pretty good pace. Sayan was working on making the frontend for his application, Aniket working to build the backend for the web application. We had planned the project in this way-
At 2-3 P.M, we were served our lunch and by then we were so hungry we almost gave up on working. So we had lunch and then got back to work. We also had a checkpoint at 5:30 P.M, which was later delayed up till 7. We were served tea to keep us warm and running for the project. Aniket had completed working on the frontend of the web application, Debdut had created the APIs for the backend and the work on the backend had already started, Sayan was working on further optimization of his mobile application. For the first checkpoint, we demonstrated our idea and the main motive of our project and also showed our frontend part both for the web as well as a mobile application in dark mode (automated with the system theme).
We switched to the mattresses and kept on working on the backend and servers and giving our body some rest. Soon Dinner was served and we were exhausted from work and decided to have dinner and maybe stroll around a while before we got back to work. So after having dinner we went outside the college campus and walked down the roads and also bought some snacks to have at night. We returned to our designated mattress and started to work. Debdut had already made the APIs for Donor Profile, Donor Finding, Request Ticket, and Request Blood; Sayan had already done the Search for Blood Nearby Tab (with Integrated GPS), and Request Tab; Aniket had already completed the Sign In and Sign Out option in the web application with an authentication system. We stayed up doing this till 2 A.M at night and we were served coffee. One of our fellow colleague who was in another team thought that we may need coffee to get this through so he filled his flask with the coffee, it was quite generous of him that he shared some with us, that was the only thing keeping us awake. We were also served sandwiches, we had few and kept some for the night. At 2:30, I started making the presentation for the team for the pitching or presenting in the morning while Debdut and Sayan were debugging the mobile application and Aniket finished all his work and took a nap. At 4, Debdut and I had almost finished most of the work and we too decided to take a nap and wake up to complete the SMS and Email notification in case of emergency.
We both woke up at 5:30 and got to work except for Sayan who went to sleep at 6 in the morning, after solving further bugs and issues with the API and also the Blood Required Tab. We were told by our mentor to keep in mind the protocol of Blood Donation that each donor could donate at an interval of 3 Months, so Debdut made an API to check the details of the donor with the date of his/her last donation and Aniket was trying to optimize the speed of the web application. We were served tea and the final checkpoint was delayed till 1 P.M. We completed our work, Sayan helped me draw the rough schema for our project which is this
We had finished all our work and waited for our turn to show our project, meanwhile, lunch was being served so we decided to have our lunch and then go for the checkpoint. After showing our mobile and web application to the judges, we had to wait for the results.
We went there with no hope to go further, we even waited at the campus gate. We were called up for the results and we found out that we had qualified for the second round which was the pitching round and also we were adjudged to be among the Top 6 teams. Meanwhile, Sayan wasn't feeling well so Debdut decided to go on with the presentation himself. After pitching our project we watched the others pitch while we waited for the final results. As the final results came out, as not every story gets a Karan Johar ending, likewise we didn't land a place among the Top 3. We were feeling a bit dejected and as well as not feeling well after an entire 30 hours of work. I boarded the bus and slept so deep that I didn't even realize when we had reached the station. Soon I returned home and took some rest.
Now, after everything...
After this experience, I got to learn many things, not specifically technical, but also about myself. We got everything doing this 30 hours but sleep, and this deficiency hit us so hard that our minds had almost stopped working. The most important thing in a Hackathon is not technological expertise but teamwork, understanding of one's own body capacity and willingness to compromise for the group. With time and space management, sleep and health management are also necessary for hackathons. This is what I got to learn from my first Hackathon experience that we must consider our own and our teammates' health if we want to win as a team. I had a fantastic team, we were acquainted earlier but after this we got to know each other more, knowing each others' faults could help the team grow. I want to thank my team and congratulate them on whatever we have achieved.
What the other team members had to say about their experience:
Aniket-
It was my very first Hackathon I had ever participated in, it was an adrenaline rush experience. The topic we had chosen was common so it became much more exciting and competitive for us.
I have learned a lot from that one day experience like creating a full-fledged project within 30 hours of teamwork: I had an amazing time with my teammates Debdut, Swapnanil, and Sayan. I look forward to more such hackathons.
Debdut-
HACK'N'PITCH was a great experience for me. It was my second time participating in a hackathon and it was pretty amazing. The vibe around me was so energetic. All in all it was an amazing experience.
Comments
Post a Comment