My first hacktale.
Hackathons are really a great way of bringing your true potential and while we’re working with a team we always try to focus on the prize which is there for the winner.I think the things we learn in a short span of time remain with us for a long period just like college studies (procrastinating our work and doing it at the 11th hour). And being honest people studying at the last minute managed to secure almost equal marks to the ones who’re prepping from day one.If thats the case then why not using it as a weapon.
Most Hackathons duration lie between 24 to 48 hours and in that time thinking building deploying have to be done in that amount of time.
Enough Gyan Now coming to my Tale
So this happened in febuary this year. Seeing people around myself learning DSA or competetive or studying machine learning i was working on basic html css js projects and trust me making a calculator or a clock made me feel like Mark Zuckerberg. I had no idea how to deploy them or how to put them on github. I was just learning and learning but not applying what i was learning.
I heard about this platform called devfolio from a friend of mine so i went there and explored some hackathons like what are they and a week ago i heard that my cousin who is also in the same branch but studying in NIT.I am from jaypee. Comparing Private and government college students is like comaparing salman khan with john snow.I could be wrong but this was what seems to me at that time.Moving on, So i registered for a hackathon which was conducted from a recognized hub named IEEE. Now comes the team up part, I joined their discord server and their whatsapp group and i said hey i am alone please team up with me. Now comes the role of our friend the inferiority complex.Looking around i saw people who are masters in their domains. In the same group some other person also put his request for team up i dm’ed him privately saying please teamup with me. Luckily he was from web development too.The problem statements were yet to come so we could’nt decide in advance what to make.The problem statements came and it mentioned 5 options and 6th option was open innovation.We had no idea how to proceed with the first five because to be honest I was a noob at that time.
So we went with open innovation i was perplexed and feeling i should skip it.But my partner guided me and he himself was a reactjs developer and he had won 4 to 5 hackathons before. Looking at him as my only hope i asked him what to do.Now in the morning came the problem statements and till evening we have’nt wrote a single line of code.And on top of that we had our first evaluation at 8 oclock in the evening.He send me a tutorial and told me to follow it along. Till then he is handling the evaluation. I followed and i am just blindly listening to the guy in the video explaing the functions of each step and i am listening and buidling. It took me around 3 hours to build that component. Finally it was over and my github chart started filling as i learned to push my project to github and also learned some amount of react. The evaluation went good and my partner was like send me the zip folder. We divided the work and i started gaining some confidence. Out of 48 hours we now had approximately 22 hours left and in that time we had to work on our presentation,video and also the rest of the project. Sleeping only for 5 hours next day we started working on it. He managed the video and presentation part and gave me resources to follow for the rest of the project. And i was again and again eating his head like now what to do now i am stuck here and he beared all of it.We had our second evaluation where we have to show our progress of our project.By evening our project was complete and now only thing was left was to test it and to submit it.
We merged the components and tested the project and by luck it was working. He made the video which was approximately 3 minutes long and we submitted it.
THE CONCLUSION
In my first hackathon i was able to raise myself from a html css developer to a react js developer, I was able to understand the API calling,git github,react basic concepts and how to render them. And also how to think learn and build in a binded time. After the short listing and all we were in the top 10 teams out of 400+ teams. Well this was something i did’nt expected.
Ending this i would say that getting out of my comfort zone and really testing my skills really paid not with money but by making me better. Sadly we were not in the top 3 but i was happy because in just 48 hours i was able to learn much more than i could have learned by myself. Throwing myself into something like this was worth it and after this i was able to won an international hackathon in march and got an award for it.
If you read till here just throw yourself outside the comfort zone because opportunies are everywhere we just have to grab them and climb up.
