It’s been almost a year since the Hackathon and I am finding the motivation to write about it now. I am not sure why it took me so long to write. Probably because I’m lazy and the current semester break has left me with some extra time in which I find myself doing the random small things that I have been putting off for a long time.
Anyway, coming to the Hackathon, it was Hackverse 4.0 conducted by NITK-Surathkal and Devfolio. As with most of the hackathons that I participated in, it began with RV(Rajagopalan) sending the link to the hackathon asking if we should participate in it. This was during our Semester 4 starting and after our GSoC proposal submission when we all were pretty free and were looking for something to do. So on the next evening in the amFOSS lab, we asked everyone if they were interested in participating and started forming teams. Weirdly tho, unlike the usual time size of up to 4 for hackathons, Hackverse only allowed a team size of up to 3. Initially, 9 of us were interested in participating and formed 4 teams in which I, Aashray and Abhinav were together.
This was followed by the most chaotic phase of participating in hackathons, ideation. Aashray wanted to build something high-impact and solve some of the real-world problems. I on the other hand wanted to build something fun and exciting that could be wrapped up in 36 hours where we would get to try out new suff. My idea was an interactive story generator and narrator app for young children using LLMs. Eventually, we weren’t able to finalize any idea and decided to proceed with my idea if we weren’t able to come up with anything better by hackathon day.
This is in contrast to our usual hackathon preparation and experience where we would have the idea outlined, a repository created with the basic structure of the project and a list of things that we need to do during the hackathon ready beforehand. This time we were going in without any idea and preparation. To be fair, we all just wanted to have fun and were not really looking to win anything.
We booked the tickets to Mangalore and started the bumpy overnight journey to NITK on a sleeper bus the day before the hackathon. Before that, we spent a night in Alapuzha at Hari’s place and roamed around Kochi for a while the next day. It was the first sleeper-over most of us were having after a long time and the night was spent playing games and having good conversations with each other. We reached NITK by 7 in the morning and were greeted by the beautiful campus and the cool breeze. The vastness of the campus and the distance between the buildings was something that tired us Amritapuri kids who were used to walking 2km every day from the Aashram hostel to the college and back during our first year. The April heat didn’t make all the walking any better.
The Hackathon started around 11 in the morning and the coding round went as usual with coding sprints, snack breaks, energy drinks and a sleepless night. I was working on the backend while Aashray and Abhinav worked on the front end. It was also the first time that I was working with Flask which along with the short timespan resulted in the final backend code being a convoluted mess that can be used as an example of bad coding practices.
During the coding phase, we also went out and explored the campus a little. Seeing the relatively more freedom, food choices and activities enjoyed by the students of NITK left us in awe. The difference in campus culture between the two campuses was evident after strolling through the grounds and footpaths of NIT for a while. We also got in touch with the representative from Devfolio and learned that he knew about amFOSS. It’s always mildly surprising when the people we meet in developer meetups, open-source organisations, hackathons etc. talk about the club and how they knew our seniors. The legacy and the impact that a small group of students from our college had left on the tech community was something that we are always proud of.
The coding round ended the next day with us having a working app with most of the planned features implemented. After our presentation before the judges, we had a few more hours to spare before the prize distribution and closing ceremony. We spent that time exploring the campus and resting for a while in our allotted rooms. The closing ceremony had the usual talks from the sponsors, organisers and the judges which most of us had a hard time staying awake for after the sleepless night. We got to know before the closing ceremony that our team is one of the ten shortlisted teams from which the winners will be selected. This gave us some confidence and hope that we would be selected as one of the winners. Surprisingly, we were announced as the first-prize winners of the hackathon and were awarded the prize money and goodies. This was the first time that I had won a national-level hackathon and congratulations started pouring in from our friends and college mates. Weirdly tho, I realised that I wasn’t as excited or happy as I was when winning competitions and exhibitions in school. The feeling was more of relief and satisfaction than happiness.
We left for Amritapuri soon after the closing ceremony and missed the music night that was happening on the campus later that night. The few hours we had before our bus was spent exploring the campus more and getting our stuff from the rooms. We reached back to our college the next day morning and skipped the classes as we all were tired, eventhough we left Surathkal early in the hope of attending the classes. The next few days were spent in the usual college routine and the hackathon was soon forgotten. The project was never worked on after that other than the time when Abhinav added more features and used it as a personal project for an application and the prize money was spent on many lunches and snacks. More than winning the hackathon or the prize money, it was the contacts I made during and after the hackathon and the experience that I value more. All the participants were given a shoulder bag and an umbrella with the Hackverse branding as swags. The umbrella was something that we used for a long time and has led to us finding fellow Hackverse participants later on in other events.