We thought this hackathon would be about coding.
Turns out… it’s really about thinking.
DEVTrails2026 #Hackathon #Learning #BuildInPublic
I’m a CSE student, and recently our team — DevTrio — got a problem statement that didn’t feel like a usual assignment.
It wasn’t like “build a website” or “create an app.”
It was more like… understand a real problem and figure out what actually makes sense to build around it.
The first few days were honestly a bit messy.
We kept reading the problem again and again, thinking “okay, now we get it”… and then 10 minutes later, we’d realize we actually didn’t.
That’s when it hit us — there’s a big difference between reading a problem and actually understanding the people behind it.
So we stopped rushing.
Instead of jumping straight into coding, we slowed things down and just started talking it through.
Who are we even building this for?
What does a normal day look like for them?
And more importantly — what does a bad day look like?
No code, no tools. Just discussions, confusion, and a lot of rethinking.
At that time it felt like we were wasting time, but now it feels like that was the most important part.
Once things became a little clearer, everything else started moving faster. Not perfectly, but at least we had some direction.
One thing we realized pretty quickly — you really can’t build everything.
There are way too many ideas, and not enough time to chase all of them.
So we had to cut things down to:
what actually matters
what we can realistically build
and what genuinely makes sense
And honestly, that part is harder than coding.
Now we’re just 2 days away from submission, and things are starting to feel a bit real.
Deadlines are close, and explaining what we’re building sometimes feels harder than actually building it.
But this whole experience already feels very different from anything we’ve done before.
It doesn’t feel like we’re just building another project.
It actually feels like we’re learning how to think.
Still a long way to go, but this already feels like one of the most meaningful things we’ve worked on.
Ruchita
Team DevTrio
Guidewire DEVTrails 2026
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