What is it like to attend a hackathon?

Recently Paytm organised its first hackathon. Even it was our first hackthon. Before I begin with my experience I would like to share that we are enrolled in Bachelor of Technology course in computer science and are currently in the second year. We a team of four people that comprised of two guys and two girls, decided to attend our first hackathon and gain some experience.

I have subscribed to Hackathon.com mailing list and get updates for hackathons happening near me. Through this I got to know Paytm was organising its first hackathon and the ticket was free of cost. The only eligibility being here was to propose a lucrative idea(that throws a great impact on Indians) and explain how you would use Paytm APIs with it.

So I was ready with an idea and called 3 of my peers to come up as a team, who further contributed towards polishing the idea. No later, we gave our proposal and mailed the organiser personally elaborating the idea. The day later we got a mail from the organiser. He found our idea really interesting and asked for our applications. Soon we got the acceptance mail from the Paytm team to attend the hackathon. This seemed as an achievement to us. We were all set to attend our first hackathon with pride in our eyes.

As soon as we reached the Paytm’s office we were astonished by looking at the crowd there. We found ourselves as the youngest squad, and looked really inexperienced in front of them. Every other guy there was wearing a t-shirt he/she got in their last hackathon. Their Laptop’s body was filled with stickers which they got at other such events. But we didn’t get demotivated cause the reason of us attending this event was to learn and gain experience.

We took photographs, interacted with staff and no later, we were taken to our workspaces and were asked to settle ourselves. Caffeine stalls were set all over. Food and snacks were also arranged by the organisers itself. The thing began with some introductions and overview of their APIs. Some already started to code while some were taking part in whatever was happening on stage. We decided to listen before work, as we didn’t want to miss anything.

After an hour or two, the coding began. That was the instance we realised that we were better in proposing ideas than actually implementing it. We decided to build an android application, and let me be very true, none of us had worked on android development before. The two girls in our team decided to handle the front end of the project and me and the other guy in my team took the backend upon us. On one laptop we had the Android Studio opened and on the other the Google Search Engine to its full potential. We started working from scratch. To our surprise, after interacting with a few people over there, we found that most of them came with some already coded stuff. Fair enough, as everything was to be planned beforehand.

Apart from coding stuff, we met some smart peeps over there and discussed our ideas with them. Most of the teams were corporate ones. Some came to launch their startups with well-versed marketing strategies too. All in all, it was a great learning process interacting with such people.

Some hours later, guys from Amazon Web Services also visited the site. They brought some 100$ AWS credits for the participants. To get those credits all we had to do was go and talk to them about their services and present our ideas and tell them how we can use their services. We went, proposed and managed to get the 100$ worth credits. This was another small achievement that motivated us.

We went back to our workspaces and resumed with the code stuff. Our work was totally based on learning-then-implementing process. We managed to design the interface within first 12 hours. Midnight, we started working on backend stuffs, brainstormed on errors, also got stuck at various instances with the Google APIs. Somehow we managed to present the prototype before the Hackthon ended. What we missed, was one of the most important aspect of judgement, the Paytm APIs. Yes, we couldn’t integrate our apps with the API in the time which was left. Although, the staff there and the Paytm Team was very helpful and provided full support at every step wherever we encountered any problems. The organiser was really cool, he talked frankly with each one of us. He appreciated our idea a lot and did whatever he can do to let our ideas take off. Unfortunately, we couldn’t integrate the Paytm APIs. We didn’t win any of the Grand Prizes there.

All we brought with us was some learning, some new experience, gained some knowledge from smart fellows, new skills and ofcourse not to forget the Hackathon Swag and our small-but-engouraging achievement: The 100$ AWS credits.

Here’s what we call Hackathon Swag!

Just wanted to end with saying that, Hackathons are a great place to learn. It provides a great experience for beginners and benefits the professionals with the on site networking and helps them to take their ideas to next level. Do not hesistate to attend one just by assuming that you’re not capable. At the end, it’ll surely gonna benefit you.

Needless to say, Hackathons can change your perspective towards coding, for good. Period.