Recently, our team has won a hackathon competition HackNSU4 organized by the ACM student chapter, North South University, Bangladesh. It was really an amazing achievement for the whole team as we had to manage a lot of academic activities and also had to travel 6 hours to participate in this competition.
However now I would like to share our experience in the competition and some tips for anyone who is eager to participate in any hackathon in the future.
In this hackathon, at first, we were asked to submit an idea on some specific scopes. There were mainly 4 scopes on which we could submit our idea: transport efficiency, Reducing energy crisis, and reducing cyber harassment.
we submitted our idea in the first scope where we had the idea of an advanced ticketing system. our idea was basically to reduce the number of unused seats on the Bangladesh railway and prevent tickets from being sold on the black market.
However, our idea was selected and we were invited to participate in the final round. In the final round, there was no pre-code allowed. We had to start building our application from scratch. This was an 8-hour hackathon and within this time we had to complete the prototype and also the presentation and the speech.
The most focused part of the competition was the presentation because it is definitely not possible to implement all the features in the prototype and show a demonstration. However, we still worked really hard and created a prototype for web and also mobile applications.
With the grace of Almighty God, we have managed to become the champion with all our struggles but also I think there were some parts where we could have worked a bit more strategically.
Prototype: While making the prototype only focus on the features that are the highlighters of our idea instead of implementing general stuff like login, and signup page. Because this is a prototype, you need to only show that you know how to make this happen and you can code to make this happen.
Dummy Data: You don't need any database. So don't waste your time configuring your database. As we were working with transactions we were using a MySQL database and I had to spend a lot of time just connecting my application with my database. But you really don't need this because this is a prototype.
Front-end: Again just make a dummy front-end. It doesn't need to function properly and fetch any data. Just set some internal logic and data with hard coding and show that you can do this with the application, that's it
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