WTF Hackathon — My first hackathon experience
It all started when I saw the Chargebee’s WTF hackathon event — a hackathon run for women, by women. It sounded really cool and I was really excited to give it a try. Immediately I pinged Bhavani and asked her if I can join her team. With Bhavani, Naren and Krithika (my tech meet-up friends) onboard— team iKeepLog was all ready to rock and roll.
Why did I want to go to the hackathon?
There is more to a hackathon than just coding. I have always been a mentor for young students in tech competitions and the thought of being a participant myself thrilled me. How often do you have such events, that too for women, which is also open to all from diverse backgrounds? A great shout out to Chargebee and the team for organizing this!! You get to learn new things, you meet new people and you get to see what it is like to build something from an idea to an MVP over the weekend. Oh yeah, for a person who loves building things and overcoming the challenges that crop up, the WTF hackathon seemed the right place to be!
How did I prepare myself for the hackathon?
To state that I was nervous will be an understatement. My teammates are all fulltime developers and I knew that I had to do my basic homework in order to overcome my imposter syndrome. When I learnt from my teammates that we would be using Python and Django for the backend, I decided to be part of coding the backend. I promised myself that I will learn Django before the event and I went on a learning spree. I django-ed a whole week, working on simple projects — to understand function based views, class based views and so on. As with any programming language, the more I learnt about the difficult concepts, the less I felt I knew about it. But I was ready to face the challenge and learn at every opportunity.
My experience at the hackathon
I had the least coding experience in Python and Django in my team. The first thoughts that ran in my mind — How will I contribute to the project? How will it be like to work with experienced developers? How is it all going to turn out? Will I feel left out? Thanks to my supporting teammates, it all vanished the moment the hackathon took off! We all started working on iKeepLog — a chatbot in your organization’s messaging platform that pings you at regular intervals to get your status update. This was the first time I worked with Django, Python and Postgres in a project. I was quite nervous but my teammates Bhavani, Krithika and Naren were so supportive and encouraging. I was coding with Naren on the backend (Python and Django) while Krithika was working on the frontend (React) and Bhavani was working on her Slackbot in Python. Good communication, positive spirit and hard work helped us in getting our product all up and ready. Our mentor Ms. Vaishnavi helped us fine-tune our business model. It is important to think about the bigger picture — how our product will solve the problem and who will gain value from the product. Her inputs really helped us in collecting our thoughts and put together a great presentation.
Winning my first hackathon
We all know that hackathons aren’t really about winning prizes. Hackathons are ideal events for disruption and imagination. It is all about learning new things, working with a cool group of individuals and trying to build something cool with awesome technology. Having said that, how do you feel when you get rewarded for working on something cool with a bunch of amazing friends? And when I won my first hackathon, I am at a loss for words to describe the feeling. I am glad that I attended the hackathon thanks to my friends — Bhavani, Krithika and Naren. To all new budding programmers out there — Are you looking out for ways to improving your programming skills? Go to a hackathon and have fun learning!
