Smart India Hackathon 2023 journey

From the last month, I and my team have been on a journey to India's biggest Hackathon i.e. Smart India Hackathon. In this blog post, I want to share about the journey so far. It's really fun and challenging at the same time.

Team Formation:

This time, it was about SIH, we can't compromise. So picking the valuable members was really a tough thing. This time, a female participant was mandatory for every team. One more thing is SIH is not only about the development part but also how innovative is your solution to the given problem statements. So we had to include the members according. The members of a team really play an important role in a Hackathon. Luckily I got some of the best people contributing to our team, really hard-working ones and bringing some innovative ideas.

Selecting the problem statement

Selecting a problem statement was another challenging stuff. From a total of 239 problem statements(182 - software-based & 57 - hardware-based), selecting the most appropriate one was a big difficulty for our team. We even changed our problem statement midway, through when we saw the number of submissions in our problem statement was increasing drastically. During the selection of the problem statement, we had to keep a lot of things in mind, like - the one which is more realistic, whose solution is not already on the internet, in which we can put more of our innovative ideas, whose no. of submissions were not that high, which is related to the trending topics, etc. So yes we had to think a lot before selecting our problem statement.

Designing the Solution

The most important thing during the whole journey till now. I can't tell how many uncountable meetings our team has done to finalize our solution. Designing the main solution, including the trending topics, bringing some salient features out of the box, and ideas that can generate revenue, did take a lot of brainstorming. Then the making of the PPT, adding the approach, use cases, showstoppers and even the clear-cut flowchart explaining each and every feature and the working of our solution. Dividing the whole task among ourselves, and modifying it more and more, we came to the end. The Tech Stack that we will be using to make our web app is based on the modern javascript framework Nextjs with Typescript, Tailwind, Nodejs for the backend, Mongodb for the database and using some ML libraries like Tensorflow, numpy with Python.

Internal Hackathon and Future Plans

Glad to say that we have crossed the Internal Hackathon smoothly among the 57 teams of our college. We have put in a lot of effort, so now let's wait and watch if we can make it to the Grand finals or not. Till now I have really enjoyed working for the SIH. Now the only wish is to go to the Grand finals and have the real hackathon experience and who can say we might win😂😂(Fingers crossed🤞)