My First Hackathon
A few days back me and my friends participated at out first hackathon organised by our college BYLD club, we were asked to build web based or a Android based application or anything like a game, machine learning stuff etc. Many teams participated be it the first years or the PhD scholars, it was a good learning experience for everyone.
As many teams we were also not prepared for the event, and decided to learn everything during the event itself, it was a 12hr hackathon which may seem considerably less as opposed to many hackathons which go on for days. At the start we were also very confused about what to make, considering the themes given to us our options were quite limited by our knowledge and skills since we were only 1st years and had very minimal knowledge of coding and apps development. After a lot of discussion with the mentors, we came down to the conclusion of making a website which will be like a medium of memes, where one could login and watch numerous memes sorted into categories , upvote-downvote, and even download and upload memes to the portal for other people to see. Seems to be a pretty good idea to us, but now come the difficult part of implementing this very idea. We decided to divide our team of 4 into 2’s, me and my friend were managing the front-end while the other two were making the database and the back-end of the website. Html and Css was not so new to me as I had done a bit of it earlier so after watching some tutorials and lot of web surfing we started coding and surprisingly the front-end turned to to be decently good for a first timer and were quite happy about it. But developing the front-end was the easy part, the guys who were handling the back-end were dealing with FLASK which is very new to all of us, and created a lot of issues while implementing it we also took help with the seniors and mentors and they were more or less able to handle our queries. The database and the server now created and back-end done, now it’s time to integrate the two to make the website working, which we failed to do. Let me explain it, 2 of us were dealing with html Css while the other 2 were dealing with flask, now for integrating the two one should have the knowledge of both the front-end and back -end which all of us lacked and since time left was quite limited we made numerous efforts to make it working but unfortunately were unable to do the same.
Certainly, we didn’t win or even nominated for the prizes, but this was a very good learning experience for all of us and also we came to know a lot about stuff which are not taught to us in college. Now, we are better prepared for our next hackathon and I hope we would be better next time.