About Me

Hey Everyone. Myself Arpit Babbar. I am 20 years old and final year Engineering Student (CS Major). I've no prior experience of blog writing and stuff so please pardon me for any mistakes.

So, I'm writing this blog as a part of > Learning in Public Initiative! And, Today I'll be sharing my experience of my first Hackathon - from having a no team to winning the Track Prize 😋.

Finding Hackathons

Last month I was scrolling on internet and reading some random articles where I got to know about hackathons and prizes associated with them and yes swags too (yeah my main motive was for free swags😂😅 but that too I didn't got😩). So, I came across Major League Hacking(MLH)'s website and spent some time there and I registered for a weekend Hackathon (26 Jan - 28 Jan, 2022). I've no teammates and I didn't even know what I'd to do in the hackathon. The only thing I knew was to make a project in 36 hours(*Insert Aman Gupta's "Hum Bhi bna lenge ji!" 😂). Hoya Hacks 2022 - the Hackathon organized by Georgetown University, Washington DC and yes thanks to this virtual world, which we're going through right now, I was able to take part in this online and from the convenience of my home (yeah yeah I know Travelling is fun and all but please remember this was my first hackathon and I'd no clue what project I'll make in it😂).

Team-Building

So, on the day of Hackathon, things didn't go good from the beginning, I missed the Opening Ceremony due to difference in time zone and after that somehow I managed to check-in during last moments. After the check-in I asked the worst possible question you can ask to a organizer - What I have to do after this? He was totally confused like Bro? This is a Hackathon go and Code😂 (Obviously he didn't said that). Josh (organizer) was very supportive he gave me the discord link for the Hackathon and after that the main part started. There I got to know from one of the moderators that you've to be in a team (2 - 5 members) to be eligible for this hackathon. As I didn't had a team so I went to #team-building section in that server and for 4 straight hours I was explaining everyone my skills, what projects I've done etc. etc. (yeah I was like - mujhe team mein lelo yr mujhe project bnane h😂). And finally after grinding for around 6 hours in that section we finally made a team. Ameya, Anthony, Soham and myself that was the finalized team (we'd an another member but he didn't contribute so he was not on our side). One checkpoint is cleared that we've a team now but What Next? What Project should we made? What Tech Stack should we use? We had no clue! 🤣

Our Project

So, we start by what tech stack each of us know I finally we decided for HackerMatch. So this was our final project which we finalized and Ameya said he is good in front end so he made a great frontend for our project I took care for the backend part like creating and managing databases and APIs and stuff and Integration of the project. We used MERN stack for HackerMatch and Anthony built the Algorithm for us. We were working ourselves on the part specified to us but the main challenge was of communication. All of us were from different time zones so it was pretty difficult for us to communicate and match our ideas or discuss the next steps. But somehow we managed and atleast we made our own specific parts (If you guys want project details, I'll write another blog for that one).

Final Hours of Hackathon

We were like 4 hours left on the clock for the final submission and our integration and representation part was all left. Also we had to do some minor changes on our ends too. So all of us knew that integrating that project would take us time for now. So modified frontend and the video to make it look like everything is sorted🤣🤣🤣. Well come on man don't judge me for this we did a great job in very less time and yeah "Itna toh chlta Hai!"😅. So we pushed that code to a github repo and also added Anthony's Algo to it and published it on Devpost. Ameya did a great job in explaining the project and making a very nice description for the project ( You can read about the project here.)

Results

So, that's how I completed my project for my first Hackathon😂. Obviously who would've thought that an unfinished project will make it to winners board of the Hackathon. So did I. But But But God is Great my friend. And at last results came and we won Hoyas Track Prize ( a side prize you can say😂). Like, I'd no words for it but yeah that give me a lot of motivation on a personal scale and from that day it changed my vision. I started managing my time more and write a lot of code and taking part in weekend Hackathons and completing projects😗.

What I learned?

So yeah my first Hackathon Experience was a great I made some good connection and learnt a lot of new things as well. Also I urge more and more students or more and more coders to take part in hackathons and start contributions to open source. But there is one thing I would say I didn't received my SWAGs due to global restrictions 😑😂. Like bro I only took part for some nice SWAGs and ahhh nevermind.

Thank you guys for reading my blog and yeah pardon me for any mistakes. PEACE🤞