My First Online Hackathon
My Experience and how our team made it till the 4th place
Last year in 2021, I participated in my life's first-ever hackathon. There is an interesting story behind this. Let me share it with you.
Discovery
Due to covid every school and college in India are being conducted in online mode. So the hackathons unlike the traditional ones are also organised in online mode.
On September 28th, I received a message in a random WhatsApp group. The message was regarding a hackathon which was organised by AISSMS IOIT, engineering college, Pune and was sponsored by Indian MNC Tech Mahindra.
After reading the message, I learned that the deadline for registration was 29th Sept which was the same day I received it. It was too late to think over it but I still didn't lose hope and gathered my team and registered for it on the same day. And from now our journey begins...
Planning
Our team was of 4 members: Prerana, Dixita, Sanket and yes me. We held a Google meeting in the evening and decided to work on a Django project. Before that, let me tell you guys, I had never worked on any Django project. It was the first time I got my hands on it.
Now, we decided to make a social media website for Indian farmers in which we stated:
Farmers hesitate to post on big platforms like Instagram, Facebook, also they are not a suitable place for such types of posts. So for their convenience, we provide a social media platform. All agriculture related posts and expert advice, readily fast answers to the queries and suggestions by different experienced farmers. All these make this platform a great hub for the agriculture industry.
We had to submit our idea in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. (wanna have a look?)
Waiting
We had to wait for 2-3 days after submitting our idea. After learning that 50-60 teams had submitted their ideas from all over India, I lost my hopes. But colleens in our team didn't. Both the young ladies, Prerana and Dixita, kept us motivated throughout.
The results were announced on 3rd October and our team got selected 🥳🥳
Further Planning
On the 3rd itself, we had a meeting in the evening and started brainstorming on our project. I was chosen as the leader of the team.
We led down the whole plan of the project on MS Onenote and divided the tasks among us.
The Actual Work
As you know, I had no experience of Django still I dared to take that project. So now I had to start from scratch building my understanding. I went through the documentation of Django, I made a small hello world application then I gained some confidence and I told myself, "come on boy you can do it, all is well!" and I started working on the actual project.
Prerana's task was to provide us design ideas, Dixita was supposed to research APIs and Sanket's work was to develop the frontend part. They all did their job perfectly. Finally my task was to compile everything.
The Difficult Part
We had final inspection on 8th October and on 10th October we had to submit our projects. A lot of work was pending. The marketplace, the friend system, the news page all were our key features but we couldn't complete it by 8th.
My team worked whole night and we somehow managed to complete it by 9th.
The marketplace section was intentionally kept underdeveloped because it needed real-time market data.
And Finally The Day Arrived
On 12th September, the results were announced. We gave our 100% to prepare our project but as our project was underdeveloped, it made me lose the hopes to get our team selected in top 10.
But as soon as they announced the top 5 finalists, me and my teammates were shocked! Our team was in the finalist and we secured 4th position 🏆
Though we were at 4th place, we had a great experience working over it, we learnt from our mistakes and I am sure, we will improve them in our next project.
Mentions
I want to thank my whole team, for their precious support and co-operation; A special thanks to AISSMS IOIT, Engineering college, Pune and Tech Mahindra, for giving us an opportunity and encouraging us.
Last but not the least, I want to thank you if you read this long. I appreciate your support. Please comment down your views.