Before Participation
I came across a website named Devfolio via my friend's reference. Actually one of my friend had participated in a hackathon named as Hack4Bengal and they had to submit their project on the Devfolio dashboard. So, I asked him to show me what project he and his teammates have made together and what is a hackathon and other stuffs and details of participating in a hackathon as I have never participated in any hackathon before.
Then, he gave me the link to their submissions and I came to know about the website and discovered Holiday Hacks and other hackathons. I found HackoFiesta on that website which was another hackathon held last week and obviously I had participated there(my first hackathon).
I have documentation about my first hackathon in my other blog.
So, basically this was my second hackathon and I registered for it to geek out with new people and build something great.
After Participation
After participation, I joined their official discord server and checked in all the channels and criteria's of the hackathon. And after that, I learnt that it was the time for making a team.
Team Building 🤼
As mentioned in their website, we're allowed to make a team of 4 members.
So, I reached out other servers like EddieHub and Community Classroom on Discord and asked for girl teammates who is interested in participating in the hackathon with me.
I asked for girls only because I wanted to have a girl's team and then a few days later 2 people reached me out. One was Vandana Vaswani and the other one was Akebu Simasiku. Then I invited them to join my discord server and created a private category for us to have our project discussion.
Project Discussion
We fixed a meeting on last Wednesday and had an introductory session like getting to know each other and then we discussed about our team name and project idea. We came up with many team names and various project ideas. Eventually, it took a little time to think about it and also I came to know that it was the first hackathon for both of them. So, being the team leader I guided them and cheered them up for the hackathon.
Finally, on the day before the starting of the hackathon, we finalized our project and team name.
Our Team: Dev Girls
Our Project: Moody
It was under the theme Healthcare.
Brief Introduction About Our Project
Moody is a chrome extension that will help you filter your home page of your Chrome Browser according to your mood and care for your mental heath and help you perform better.
Mental health has become one of the most important and biggest issues nowadays. Although it cannot be cured properly(stress, anxiety) but we're trying to solve it as much as we can by this extension.
Our project is Open Source and public on Github.
Tech Stack:- HTML, Bootstrap, JavaScript
Check out the GitHub repository and the YT video.
Hackathon Starts 👩💻
The hackathon started at 6 p.m. on 29th April(Friday) with the Opening Ceremony. We then started to design our extension pages using Figma and made a prototype of our extension in Figma. I made a part of it and then handed it over to Vandana to do the rest of the part.
Then I along with Akebu started coding. I made the landing page and pushed the code to GitHub while Akebu was documenting how to use our Chrome extension locally.
Then, I made a few other pages for the moods and handed over to Akebu to complete the rest of it as I had to go to college on Saturday morning.
Akebu did the rest of the part and after I came back from college, I started with the documentation part in the README; enhancing the README file on GitHub. But we ran into a major problem which still lies in the extension currently as we're not permitted to make any changes in the repo until the results are out.
The problem is that we're unable to head over to the pages which are linked to our moods and we found the problem yesterday that it was happening due to one of the bootstrap classes modals. We checked locally on our computers by removing the classes and found that it's working fine.
Project Submission 👩💻
Time was running out and we're unable to fix the major bug and it was almost 5 p.m. in the evening and there's only 1hr left for the submission. So, we thought to leave the code as it is and start making the video for describing our project. I recorded the video and editing with Canva and VSDC and finally uploaded to YouTube. Meanwhile the deadline was extended for another 1hr and I got the chance to lower my stress and work properly. Then finally submitted the project on Devfolio dashboard.
You can check out our project submission here.
Hackathon Ends
At 7 p.m. the hackathon ended and a session started on the Aviyel platform. It was an amazing Open-source session by @joshuapoddoku with the co-host Vaibhav Agrawal where they talked about the importance of Open Source, Community Building, and Networking with people in tech and a bit about DevRel. It was like somewhat a mentoring session and all the participants there got to learn a lot. Also, during the session I had my GitHub profile review done by @joshuapoddoku Sir. This gave me the interest to participate more in future hackathons like there's a lot to gain from it.
Our Learnings and Future Goals of Our Project
The hackathon helped us to deep dive into Bootstrap classes and JavaScript. Since, we're the beginner's team and this was our first attempt to make a Chrome extension and that too within a short time limit of 24 hours, we faced many difficulties while building it.
Our future plans for our project is to make it more better and add more emotions to our extension and the most important work to do is to fix the major bug on GitHub which still lies in our source code there.
We're also thinking about to add new features to it and maintain the extension and help people to use it as much as they can.
Conclusion
I personally would like to suggest you to go for hackathon.
This would help you to
- geek out with many new people,
- work as a team,
- Open Source your ideas,
- contribute and collaborate with people, and
- gain many new things.
Don't register with the fear that I won't be able to win the hackathon. Hackathons are the best way to nurture your learnings and come up with some great ideas and products to solve real-world problems. In this process, you'll get the taste of professional work of making a product or solving a real-life problem as a developer.
Also, this will give you the eager/urge to learn some new technologies and develop your skills. 🚀
Hope this helps you. Thank you for reading, and let's connect!
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