My First Hackathon Experience and why you should get one?

This hackathon has simply been my best learning experience to date in my journey to what all tech has to offer to those who choose this path. I wish there are more to come.

This hackathon provided me with the necessary hands-on experience that every job-seeking student should get to make them a little familiar with what would it be like to collaborate as a team and build projects that necessarily solve real life problems. It also teaches you about the scope of technology, and how it can bring about a breakthrough in almost every domain and improve lives.

Personally, this hackathon helped me to boost my confidence, taught me the importance of planning and organising, and also how to get things done. It also apprised me of my skill level and what all skills are in demand. For instance, I noticed, there were very few teams who had a backend developer.

About the Hackathon

I guess everyone has some idea about what is hackathon but let me introduce it in brief. A hackathon as it sounds is similar to a marathon in which instead of maintaining the willpower to keep running, you have to keep working on a programming project of yours. The project is based on problem statements in most cases that you are provided by the organisers of the hackathon. There can be one or more problem statements to choose from, it depends. Now once you select a problem statement you need to come up with a solution that has some real-world application. Don't worry, you'll be provided with separate time for brainstorming and planning. Once you've decided what you are going to build then your team together should make a plan and divides the work based on skill levels and also decides the tech stack being used to build the project. I would particularly emphasise more on this step more because you just can't randomly start building stuff as time is limited and your team needs to work efficiently to come out with a well presentable solution.

In my case the hackathon was being organised as a part of Samsung's Campus Innovation program for which we had classes first and then the hackathon. We were provided with multiple problem statements from different domains like healthcare, finance, retail, entrepreneurship etc. The domain we selected was healthcare and the subdomain was Immunisation recorder, which I can also say was our project. The reason we selected it was that we had the necessary skills to build the project and finish it on time.

Now talking about team formation I was randomly matched with my teammates, but I can say with confidence there could not be a much better team combination possible. My team had all the required skills, we had two frontend developers, one expert backend developer and me. I was responsible for system designing, planning and logic designing as I had good knowledge and experience in frontend as well backend projects. Also, your contribution doesn't need to only be in the form of code, no code contributions are very much required in building projects. They may include planning, UI designing, content writing, preparing pitch presentations etc.

Choosing the problem statement

The selection of a problem statement (if provided) is a vital step. Some things to keep in mind are:

• Choose problem statements based on the skill set of your team. I m not saying that you should limit your scope because of this ,but you should little knowledge or experience of the skill required to implement in your solution.

• Plan a solution that can be achieved in the given time period, generally 24 hours in most cases. In my case since there was no stay during hackathon so time-limit was 3 days starting from 8 am till 6 pm with breaks included in between.

• Choose a problem statement which you really think is important and needs to be resolved.

  Once you have selected the problem statement then work together in synergy and prepare yourself for long hours of sitting staring at your screens building your projects. Start of with initial planning and designing of structure of the solution. Give all ideas you have don't hesitate. Divide the work and ensure that things get done in time,if you are the team lead. Prepare a roadmap if possible.

  What did we build for the hackathon?

  We build a very simple yet useful a digital digital immunisation recorder for kids and paediatirician to maintain a record of all the doses that are to be or are already administered to the child. Further it had a reminder feature which which you remind the parents by sending SMS , whatsapp message that it is time for child to get a vaccine administered. Obviously we achieved this through the help of Twilio APIs.Due to time constraint we were not able to add other feature and hence we decided instead to fully complete and present our project with current features.

• The tech stack we used for this project included the use of Laravel PHP framework, for the database we used Mysql, and the front end was created completely using HTML-CSS only. Further through this project, I learned how to use Apache Xampp to run project dependencies using without locally installing them.

• Here are some screenshots from the project and source code:

• https://twitter.com/2003vikask/status/1657948268956102657?s=20

• Source Code: https://github.com/vikaskumar2703/immunization-recorder

  Conclusion

  This was the gist of my first in-place Hackathon and I hope you got to learn something out of it! Taking part in Hackathon is super easy and no matter what skills you have you can always contribute towards making something,as a team or as an individual.