My first hackathon experience and the embarrassment 😂

I am writing about my funny story which turned out to be life-changing and gave me the motivation to go out of the college syllabus and gather some extra skills.

The time was back in September 2019 when I first got a message about a hackathon inviting applications for participation. Back then I was no more than a student who could barely write code. The hackathon was organized by Xpanxion. It was an open hackathon and anyone could participate and build projects in any domain. So I and a bunch of my friends formed a team and decided to participate in this hackathon. None of us knew much about development or had any domain-specific knowledge. All we knew was a little bit of python and C++. Also, we had some knowledge about math techniques like linear regressions and the GUI library of python called Tkinter. I had built a few UIs using Tkinter which looked like windows 98 themed apps. All grey and dumb. However, we were somehow confident enough that this library paired with a machine-learning algorithm would make an awesome hackathon project. (spoiler alert: We were wrong). So we teamed up and started building the project which by the way was an app that trained on past JEE(an entrance engineering exam in India) scores of a number of students along with the college cut off marks and when a student would enter in his score would predict colleges that he had a chance of getting admitted to. So basically a college predictor made using simple linear regression and a windows 98 themed GUI made using Tkinter. Imagine the UI to be like the windows 98 start menu and the taskbar. No animations, no transitions, no colours all grey.

We were still confident that we would make it through. We made a classic presentation video for the qualifying round which focused more on the presentation skills than the actual project. It had very little of the project and too many of the features that we would put in by the finals that included study tips, book recommendations and so on. Not to forget all in a Tkinter window. Luckily we got past the qualifying round(as it had only video submissions) which boosted our confidence even more. By now we were above the world thinking that we'd knock off any project very easily.

The Final Showdown 😂

The day came, it was a pleasant October morning. We were invited to the Xpanxion's office along with 12 other teams. We were greeted with company T-shirts and breakfast(one of my favourites - South Indian Food). It was my first time to a software company and I was feeling very happy to be here. After breakfast, we had some time to set everything up until the judges arrived. After an hour the event started. Judges were from reputed companies like Xpanxion Bajaj Finserv, Oracle and a company from Germany. The host introduced everyone and the presentations started. The very first participant was a professional UI/UX design team and they had built an amazing email template library that can be used to send kickass emails. I am not going into details of the projects of all the participants. But to name a few there was an ML project which could detect potholes on-road and prevent accidents, an Android app which was a marketplace for farmers, an app that would help the blind people see what things are around by constantly providing voice feedback and many other innovative ideas with excellent UIs. Out of the 13 presentations, 6 were performed and we were next. I got so tensed looking at the projects of people. I could see our Tkinter windows and the colourful and innovative windows simultaneously. I constantly kept telling my team to drop off the presentation and just to go home(my team didn't agree 😂). However, before our turn, it was lunchtime. The food was decent. After that, we returned and our name was called out for the presentation. "Now we have team DedSec next." Yes, you read it right DedSec was the name of our team. Such a cool name for an uncool and dumb project and team. I was already in a state of panic and was the first one to open. The presentation started and as expected I missed 3 out of the 8 points that I was supposed to deliver. Everyone in the team did their part and it was time for the actual demo.

Suyash one of the teammate started the demo and to make things worse the demo failed very badly. Nothing happened as we planned. Our model didn't predict any score or recommendations upon entering the marks of the student. We announced that the demo had failed and concluded our presentation. Now it was time for the judgement.

The judges firstly made everyone aware of the fact that we were the youngest in the room to perform which gave me some sense of relief. Mr Vivek Kant from Bajaj finserv said that it was a nice attempt to present and we needed to work a lot both on development and the presentation skills. The judge who was a product manager at Oracle jokingly said that I don't even remember the number of times that I myself Have failed at a live demo. So it is okay to fail. But not learning from the failure is a problem. The other two judges spoke on similar lines but I vividly remember these two comments. They were stuck in my mind.

I was partly sad and motivated to learn to make stuff using programming as a tool and I did. It was the most important experience of my life without which I would not have been what I am today. So thank you Xpanxion for the hackathon and thank you judges for being supportive and not criticizing us.

We ranked last but the experience was priceless!