Bhangarwala and Azure: A Hackathon Journey of Learning and Failing Forward

It was 2022 and I was in my second year of college. There was some secret hackathon happening in our college that we didn't know of. One of my friends told me that the teachers are only listing a few people from our batch for this Hackathon. It was a big opportunity cause it was Microsoft (Azure) organizing this. In a college where hackathons were rare, this was incredibly exciting.

Only a select few were invited to the event.

So I said let it be. We will rock some other time. The next day in the morning, I was still asleep I got a call from my friend who said to me hastily come to college we are participating in this hackathon. I was like are you joking? Then I got ready packed my laptop and went to the college.I saw a lot of familiar faces there. Then we were assigned a table and we called our team “AlphaRuby”.

There were many topics to choose from. We decided on e-commerce and sustainability.

We decided to create a platform to sell scrap online called Bhangarwala.

One of our team members suggested this idea, and we went for it and started working on it. First, we had to prepare a plan, and we were going to be reviewed based on that. So we started brainstorming. Regarding our skillset, one guy from our team was an Android developer, the other was a pure business guy, and we had one girl partner as well. I was a broken web developer who thought Django was the only framework in the world, and I knew some HTML.

The Food

II have attended many tech events, meetups, and hackathons now, but none provided refreshments like Microsoft. They really cared about the participants. We had pizzas, samosas, muffins, Coke, chai, coffee, garlic bread, and more. For a college student, this was a big deal.

The Development

After the mentors reviewed our approach we had to develop the project. So we started to code. I was very bad at coding at that time I started by creating a Django project and started working on the HTML templates.
Nothing worked we were miserable we had never done real development like this before still we tried to build something presentable.
We were not able to build a complete end-to-end product. Our idea was that people could use our platform to sell scrap online. So we just created a simple multipage form via which we took data from the user like address, contact, and dates to pick up the scrap and showed a success message at the end. Iam not even sure that the data was being stored in the DB.

THE CATCH

While asking some questions to our mentor we got to know a few things that we missed.

1. The hackathon was for professionals

   This was organized for developers who are working in the industry and have experience working with cloud tech. They couldn’t get enough working professionals to participate so they got students from our college to participate. Poor Azure they are still trying to tap more developers than aws.

2. We had to deploy on Azure

   The mentor told us that we had to deploy the projects on Azure. First of all, I knew Azure was a cloud but I had never used one. I didn’t understand what exactly we had to do till the end. We tried deploying but it didn’t work and the mentors also didn’t help much.

So further on they selected a few teams and were asked to showcase their projects on the stage with a big screen. All the demos were good and all of them were justified. The professional folks built really good projects. One particular team from our college built a really great project on cutting-edge technology at that time. They used LLM in their project in 2022 when things like ChatGPT weren’t even famous. They were really ahead of their time. Winners were announced people got checks and everyone was happy.
All teams were invited on stage for a photo session.

Key Learnings from this experience

1. You have to be around people who are building stuff early on.

2. Never give up on a project and build whatever MVP you can.

3. Don’t be stuck with a particular technology learn lots of things.