I got to know about India’s largest hackathon of this year hackIndia 2015. Well, at least it supposed or claimed to be that. Though I was late but anyhow I managed to get all the tickets to be part of this event. I was super excited as it was going to be my first hackathon for which I was traveling to another city and state.
Positive Points
It was a new experience to meet new people, work together, collaborate with them to form a team and build a product. I met teammates who were strangers before, we formed a team and were the only “all girls” team there, and hence people were noticing and appreciating it. We built an application Solidarity of Sisters which is aimed to help females who are subjected to any crime. This application led us to the final part, presentation round of hackathon. There were totally 5 batches for this round and each batch had 15 teams. We managed to present our application and got positive feedbacks from judges.
Negative points that gave Positive learning
Being one of those who stayed till end of the event, I learned “how not to do things, the hard way”. There was a lot of mismanagement. There was a lesson to observe and learn at each and every step, what not to do while conducting such a large hackathon. Overall 800 people participated and many of them left the event in between because of lack of proper management. I learned how to make arrangements for providing accommodation to let participants sleep at night and for food on time. Making a proper balance of capability of providing internet and accepting number of applications is necessary to take in account before anything else. No doubt with power comes huge responsibility. I realized and learned that if you are making huge claims then you should work enough hard to plan and execute them to meet those claims.
So I got less out of the hackathon because I was expecting a lot. But I learned new things which I wasn’t expecting. I realized my capabilities of building an application without internet. And got many lessons to conduct a hackathon or any event in a better way. I am looking forward to move ahead and participate in more hackathons to learn more both expectedly and unexpectedly.