When I completed High School and entered Engineering College, I was most fascinated by Hackathons. Overnight coding with your peers, building exciting products in a short period of time, I was ready to take in these over those overhyped college fests and DJ nights.
But things don't fall into place as you wish. In India, you have to appear for an exam called JEE to get into Engineering Colleges. Well, for some n no. of reasons, I performed poorly in that exam and ended up at a fairly bad college. For additional context, we were the first ever batch of this college. Yes, that notorious Founding batch.
So the first year begins. Wait, it doesn't. We were in November, and our batch hadn't begun yet. Two waves of COVID-19 have pushed back our academics by four months. As a consequence, we had to complete two semesters within eight months. I was moving away from my home for the very first time, so this time went away in adapting to my new life, college curriculum, and the hostel lore.
Knock Knock... The second year has started. With this, in August came Smart India Hackathon. I had to assemble the team of six with one mandatory female participant. Till now, I have been a lone wolf. Learning and understanding things on my own. Before handling teamwork and dynamics. I have to find people who are ready to hustle with me and right then the realization hit. People are not curious; a hackathon is a foreign term for them. Girls who knew how to print "Hello World" are now being treated as NVIDIA stocks. However, at the end I got a team consisting of our team lead who knew his shit, one excited and curious guy, one intelligent but at that time bedridden human being, one uninterested folk,a girl and me. The internal Hackathon was just a PPT round. It went OK and we didn't get selected and the story was over. This was not a real hackathon anyways. I didn't get that experience I was craving. The rest of the second year I spent skilling up and my hunt was going on for suitable team mates.
So now I was into the latter half of my engineering degree. The alarm bells have started ringing. Now suddenly, you are stressed out about "Internships & Projects" in lieu of "Assignments & Quiz" and rightfully so. Well with the beginning of the new educational year there was a slight relief for me. I have found two comrades for my future endeavours. It is that time in the blog when I should start introducing few characters to you.
Godabaris: That bedridden guy during the last year SIH was now fully fit and ready to fight. He was crazy good at persisting to make things work. One of the best tools to win Hackathons, why should not I be excited.
Anuska: Academic Genius. She was one of the highest CGPA holders of the college and switched her branch from ECE to CSE based on first-year grades. A very good listener who has the basics sorted out. She was the key to many hackathons in the future, as she helped us in fulfilling the mandatory female participation rule.
With these two in 5th Semester I participated in many hackathons but never got selected to any final event. So my wait was now being extended. Well we built many prototypes for Corporate Hackathons such as Adobe and Walmart. It was clearly a visible growth compared to the last year.
After the completion of 5th semester in the semester break itself our university announced to host their first ever hackathon. My eyes glazed at the notification itself, my first full 36 hours hackathon dream was close. And this hackathon was going to change my life forever.
More on this in the next blog
Hackathon Arc: Birth of Yantram.dev
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