Winning Hackathons — My 4 years of College experience
In this blog, I’ll share my 4 years of experience participating in hackathons as a college student. Right from my freshman year to my final year, all my learnings, victories, and stories.
This article is going to be a big one and the best one I’ve written so far. And believe me, this is something you don’t want to miss. Lots of stories and lots of experiences are involved. I’ve been waiting to write about this since a long time. Let’s get started …
About Hackathons
Ok so coming to hackathons — what even is a hackathon? Is it something related to hacking? Well those were my initial thoughts when I first heard about this term.
Hackathon is a competition where you compete with other teams to build something within the given timeline (usually 24–48hrs). There are a few themes given, and you have to build something based on one of those themes.
1st Year — Freshman
What made me really inclined towards hackathons were the crazy attractive prizes. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t like them? That was the primary reason, I wanted to win a hackathon. At this point, I really wanted to be a part of hackathons but knew nothing, so I spent most of my time figuring out tech and learning something very basic.
2nd Year — Sophomore
So how did I get involved with hackathons? The answer is MLH.
MLH had something known as the “Local Hack Day (LHD)”, know known as the “Global Hack Week”. It is basically a week long event where you get to learn new tech, skills, build, and connect with other people. That’s when I was introduced to my teammate — Chetan. We both were part of the LHD and decided to participate together in an upcoming hackathon.
On 22nd October 2021, I participated in my very first online hackathon “Hack Around the World”. It was the first time participating in a hackathon for both of us and neither of us had any experience or any idea whatsoever. I was somewhat familiar with backend, and my teammate was with frontend. We decided to give it a go and see how it goes. After 48hrs of collaboration, hacking & building, we finally built our very first project — “Know the Place”. And to our surprise …. we won one of the prizes under the category “International Celebration Hack”!
I just cannot express how happy I was when I won my very first hackathon in the first attempt itself. That was the starting point of my hackathon journey. I didn’t stop and just kept on participating since then.
Moving on to 2 months later, it was the Christmas time! On 24th December 2021, I participated in yet another hackathon — “Hacky Winterland by MLH” with a new teammate — Shreyas (as my previous teammate was not available during this time). And again, I found the new teammate through the discord channel. We built our project — “Gift Space” and won a prize under the “Most Creative Use of Twilio” category.
Every new hackathon wasn’t just about building and winning. It was about learning something new. In every hackathon, I learned something new, something which I had no experience with previously. In this hackathon, I learned about Twilio for the first time and got to know how we could use it for messaging and email. We implemented the SMS functionality with Twilio and won a prize under Twilio’s category itself!
Devpost even featured our project on their website and posted it on their socials:
Winnings — great! What about failures? No failures, Is it possible? Absolutely not!
I shared my winnings with you, but what about failures? Yes, I did fail many times. I didn’t win a lot of hackathons, but that didn’t dishearten me. As I said previously, what’s important is that you “learn something new” every time you participate. And that’s what I did. Even though I didn’t win some hackathons, but I learned a new tech/skill each time, which helped me upskill myself for the future. Some of my failures and learnings are as follows:
- 5th November 2021 — Agent:Hacker
Project: “Ask It: Ask or answer questions anonymously without revealing your identity”
Learnings: Hosted and deployed an application for the first time. - 12th November 2021 — HackFit
Project: “Moodify: A browser extension which helps with your mental health by playing music”
Learnings: Built a chrome extension for the first time and integrated with backend. - 10th December 2021 — Bon Hacketit 2.0
Project: “Connect: A job portal with in-built video calling & advanced analytics”
Learnings: Integrated React + Django for the first time. We were using simply HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before for the frontend. - 5th February 2022 — HackViolet 2022
Project: “SheForum: A platform for women empowerment”
This was one of the best hackathons. Even though we didn’t win, but we had a lot of fun during those 48hrs. This one was with the MLH Prep gang — Kshitij, Dhruv, Harsh and me.
3rd Year — Junior
Fast forward to the 3rd year. Till now, I had been participating in online hackathons due to COVID. Now, it was time to participate in some in-person hackathons as well.
On 10th October 2022, I participated in my first in-person hackathon at my college — Hack BVICAM by IEEE.
There’s a drastic change in an online vs offline hackathon. Firstly, for the complete duration of the hackathon, you have to stay at the venue itself. So eat, sleep, code — all at the venue itself. Secondly, the presentation format changes. Unlike, some of the online hackathons (at least in comparison to the ones I had participated in), you have to give presentation through various rounds of the hackathons and answer the questions of the jury/mentors. This was not the case with online hackathons, where you just had to record a video demoing your project, and submit it.
For example, in this hackathon, there were different rounds like Round 1, 2, and then the Final. Each round is an elimination round and you have to answer the questions of the jury/mentor during each round.
After 24hrs of hacking, building & pitching, it was the results time. Amongst 100+ teams, we won the 5th prize! This winning is special as exactly 1 year back in October 2021, I won my first online hackathon, and now in October 2022 I won my first offline hackathon.
Ok great. I’ve participated & won many hackathons until now. But I’d never won the 1st Prize. Let’s be honest — “winning” is something, and bagging the 1st prize is another deal. The next story is about that.
On April 1st 2023, I participated in the HackIT@BVP2.0 hackathon. It was a 24hrs hackathon as part of our college’s annual tech-fest BVEST 2024.
It consisted of total 4 rounds — Ideation, Prototyping, Business Plan, Final Round. The 1st round was the mentoring round and each subsequent rounds were an elimination round. At around 11AM we had the first round — the mentoring round. It is a special type of round in which mentors come to you and give you feedback on your idea. There’s no judging involved in this round. Then at evening we had the 2nd round. It was an elimination round. We cleared that round and soon it was night. We had so much fun at that night — dance, late night talks, early morning walk and what not. There’s so many teams out there with whom you get to network, talk & play. Next day, at around 8AM, we had the next judging round. This was the business plan round where you had to show your business plan and how you plan to take your idea to the market. We cleared this round as well. However, there were so many teams which were eliminated in this round. They selected only 7 teams for the next round, and all the other teams were eliminated. I genuinely felt bad for the others, as they had probably spent the whole night working on their idea, and just before the final round, they were eliminated and sent back to home. Now came the final round. This is where you have to completely present your idea, working demo, product, business plan and anything else that you might have. Until now, all the rounds were being held individually i.e. the judges/mentors came to each team individually and judged/mentored them privately. This round happened on the stage in the auditorium. Everyone will watch your presentation along with the judges. This might not be a big deal for someone, but for me — who kinda has stage freight — this was definitely a problem. I started worrying as to how would I present & speak on the stage. I had to present the software part as I was the primary person involved in building that. After gathering all my courage, and rehearsing 5 times, I finally went and presented my part, along with my team. The judges cross-questioned us, and I was well prepared to answer them. After it was done, I got a sigh of relief and watched other’s presentations.
Once everyone had presented, the judges went to compile the results and choose the winners. At this time, I was pretty sure that we wouldn’t win. Why, you may ask? That’s because I found other team’s project to be much better and they seemed to have presented better. Soon the judges returned and it was the results time. As we know in any competition, the way results are announced are in the order of 3rd, 2nd and then the 1st position. First they announced the 3rd position — it wasn’t us and I was disappointed. Then they announced the 2nd position — and it wasn’t us again, and I can’t tell how sad I was. I knew that we weren’t gonna get the 1st position anyway and it would be either 3rd or 2nd if we win at all. At this point, I had completely lost hope and started thinking about going back. But then came the time to announce the winners of the 1st prize — “….. and the team that’s winner is …. Team HACKPACKERS”!
I was literally shocked and didn’t realize for the first 10 seconds as to what happened. As you can see in the above video, I was flagger basted and didn’t know how to react.
Bonus Tips:
What lead us to winning this hackathon? The answer is experience. As I’ve said before, in all my previous hackathons I learned something new and gained experience. Remember when I said above “The judges cross-questioned us, and I was well prepared to answer them”? I knew what type of questions would the judges ask and exactly those questions were asked. For instance, I was asked about the reasoning behind the tech stack. Why did I choose this particular tech stack and not any other stack? We’d used React + Django + PostgreSQL. They asked us why PostgreSQL database and not any other database like MongoDB or MySQL? My answer was that officially Django supports & recommends to use PostgreSQL as the DB for maximum performance and compatibility. I also included a bunch of SQL advantages. Next, they’d had asked us if we have any mobile application as well. We had made a web application, but according to the use case of our product, it would have been better to have a mobile application additionally, as that would increase the accessibility of the users. I’d solved this problem were cleverly. As someone who is not familiar with app development, I made my web app a PWA which allowed it to be installed & used as an android application. When I told the judges about this and showed them the app, I could clearly see that they were pretty impressed. These were just some of the examples out of many, I thought I should share.
The above is the LinkedIn wining post. Consider liking/sharing with others if you think you liked this particular story and the bonus tips I’ve mentioned helped you. (Let me know there that you read this article and I’ll know that you came after reading this story).
4th Year — Senior
Moving on to the final year. I had stopped participating in hackathons until this time as I had moved on from web development. However, then came the Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2023. It’s a national level 36hrs hackathon organized by the Government of India. This story is about that. We didn’t win this hackathon but the story is worth sharing.
On 18th December 2023, we went to Amity University, Noida for the hackathon. We reached there a night before. We were a team of 6 people and I was the team leader. It was winters and a cold night. Sadly, 2 out of the 4 developers in the team fell ill. We were made to stay in hostels.
The next day, the hackathon started after inauguration by the Prime Minister of India. To make the matters worse, I also fell ill the next morning which made the count of developers ill to be 3 out of 4. Despite this, we still worked on our idea and started developing the idea.
We had the first mentoring round in which we shared our idea with the mentors. The next round was the judging round which happened in evening. Then we had another mentoring round at around midnight. Now, by this time most of my team went to sleep as it was past midnight and some were not well as well. However, I spent the entire night coding and continuing developing our idea. The next morning, we had our next judging round. By this time, our project was 95% complete and I was pretty confident about our project as the mentors/judges also appreciated the idea and they didn’t point out any mistakes till now. However, everything changed after this round. The judges came and told that our approach was wrong and we were going in the opposite direction. They didn’t pointed out any mistakes till midnight and all of a sudden they told us that we were going the wrong way. I felt completely lost at this point and neither had any hope nor any motivation to continue after this point. To understand what went wrong, let’s quickly understand the problem statement, our approach & the judges feedback.
The problem statement was to develop a tool for generating SBOMs of a software. Like any other SBOM tool which exists in the market, we made a CLI tool, which you can run to scan any software locally. We also integrated it with a web app by which the SBOM results produced with the CLI tool would automatically be submitted to a web app, wherein the user can see the data in more user-friendly way, and can generate reports, etc. while also having some additional features like vulnerability information, alerts, policy management, etc. I knew about how to structure the project as I had experience working in this field before. However, what the judges told us that instead of a CLI tool, we should have a functionality to directly scan the software from the web app. This did not make any sense due to many reasons. Firstly, it is not feasible to scan enterprise level software with large codebases by entering their GitHub link in the webapp and waiting for it to scan the complete codebase. Secondly, as we know that every software keeps changing and new features are added to the software occasionally. This would mean that the user would have to manually go to the web app and generate SBOMs every time a new code change has occurred.
Despite, countering the judges and trying to prove them our point, we failed to make them understand. The judges were probably bound by what the ministry needed and they couldn’t do anything with that. We took a break, and after cheering up, with a fresh mind, made a new strategy and tried our best to change our product, with only a few hours left. We had to code from scratch now. All my previous “experiences” had failed at this point. I was ill and sleep deprived. I had no energy to code any further. However, I still tried to take a clever & hacky approach and somehow made the CLI run in the background, whenever the user entered the GitHub URL. With only few hours remaining, we quickly modified the frontend according to what they suggested and made the changes. At evening, we had the final judging round. We had a working model similar to what they had suggested and gave our best presentation. Then it was the winners announcement time, and we didn’t win. The judges told us that we were at the 3rd position.
Although I didn’t win the hackathon, I know I succeeded in another way. I had a very good working product which could be developed into a startup. I knew my initial approach was correct and that product could be taken to market if developed further.
Key Takeaways
- As I’ve been saying since the starting, enjoy the process and the experience. Don’t worry about winning.
- I genuinely enjoyed this hackathon as we went to a different college in a different city to compete with folks from across the nation.
- I got to experience the hostel life, even though for just 2 days, but those 2 days were very memorable.
- Networking, enjoy, play, eat, dance — something which should be a part of the process. Don’t just code all the time.
“Tips for winning?”
I get this question asked a lot, and would probably be asked again once I publish this blog — “Any tips you would like to share which can help us win the hackathon?”. Here’s a quick answer:
- Understand the problem statement/ theme first. Ask yourself this question — Does your product genuinely solve an existing problem? This should be enough most of the time to take you in the right direction.
- A good UI is very important as the backend. A great product with bad UI would lead to low scores, no matter how great your product is. That being said, the UI should not be “excellent” but at least “basic”.
- Presentation is equally important. You are the sole marketeer of your product and you have to sell it. Present it accordingly.
- Last but not the least, enjoy the process and don’t worry about winning. Focus on gaining experience and don’t forget to have fun. You’ll miss these days later. Trust me!!!
What’s Next?
There are a lot of blogs in my mind which I want to write but I’m too lazy to take out time from my schedule and write those. Some of them are:
- My experience organizing hackathons as a tech team lead
- My experience solo travelling internationally to Seattle, USA for the first time.
- My experience attending an international conference
- My experience in Boeing VS Airbus aircraft and why I didn’t fly in B737
I would probably write my next blog on my experience organizing hackathons in my college. It would be as good as this one. What would you like me to write? What topics interest you? What would you like to hear from me? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll try to include that, whenever I get the time!
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Conclusion
So that’s it about my 4 years of hackathon journey in a 15 min article. I tried to make it as short as possible by only including important hackathons & events. I would highly recommend everyone to take part in hackathons. Even if you don’t know anything, just jump in, and you’ll return learning something new with a bunch of fun memories. Don’t forget to focus on learning, gaining experience and having fun!
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Written with 💖 by a senior for all the juniors around the world!
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