Hackathon! Hackathon!! Hackathon!!! I used to hear this word everywhere on YouTube, Twitter, and in the entire tech community. So I was waiting for a chance to participate in one, and I came to know about Asia’s biggest hackathon - the ‘Smart India Hackathon which is organized by the government of India every year, and I decided to participate in it. Every college needs to nominate 10 teams from their college for SIH, so an internal hackathon was organized in the college to select these top 10 teams. And among approximately 60 teams participating in college, our team “Redemption” came into the top 10 and we got nominated by our college. After this, the results of the selected teams from the entire India were announced and unfortunately, our team didn’t get shortlisted for the finale. But god’s plan was something different, two teams from our college got shortlisted for the finale, and one of the teams among them didn't have a developer on their team, so they asked me to join them for the finale. I didn’t want to miss this opportunity - “Team Technetic” it was, I joined them!

Our domain was Heritage and Culture in the Student Innovation category. We could build anything related to this topic that would promote the rich cultural heritage of India. So we decided to make a web application that would have features like ticketless booking to monuments, promoting the unexplored festivals of India, and much more. Our nodal center was BIT Mesra, Ranchi. My college is in Pune, we booked the tickets, and I, the entire team, and two mentors from our college went to Ranchi for the SIH 2022 grand finale. The finale was on the 25th and 26th of August 2022.

The hackathon began on the 25th morning. There were 6 evaluation rounds which included judging and mentorship. In the first evaluation round, I built the basic UI of the website like the navbar and the homepage, I showed this to the judges, and they were pretty impressed with the design and colors used in the website. They gave some input and told us to work on them. I kept on coding and completed the basic structure of the entire website. As I told you SIH is a hackathon sponsored by the government of India, so travel, food and accommodation were completely sponsored by them. We were getting food, and snacks on our table. Now in the second round of evaluation, the complete front end was ready we showcased them, and the judges started questioning us about how we are going to implement the backend of this site, so we told them we are planning to use RazorPay API with NodeJS for the payment. They gave some input and told us to start working on the backend part. Meanwhile, in all these judging and coding rounds "DD Jharkhand" team from Ranchi had come to the college for covering this hackathon on TV, so they took our interview about what we were building and what problem we are trying to solve. Video. After that all the 75 centres across India who were hosting SIH 2022 had a special meeting planned with our Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi, he told us about how innovation can bring new opportunities. Now, it was time for dinner all the teams had their dinner and everyone was chilling and getting to know each other. As it was a 48hours hackathon, SIH had kept some fun sessions for the participants. So one of the team from Kolkata had brought a guitar, and our team had a good singer. So we collaborated for a fun session and started singing songs and playing the guitar. Seeing us everyone slowly joined us and all the participants started singing everyone enjoyed the break after coding and brainstorming for the entire day. By this time it was around 11 PM at Night. The next evaluation round was at 1 AM, everyone started working again on their respective projects. I started to implement the backend but for some reason, my code was having loads of errors and was not working the way I wanted it to work. Now, I became pretty tensed at this time that what if the payment not gets implemented, our entire project will go in vain and we will have only functionality i.e. the unexplored part of the India concept. Then I decided to use jugaad. I decided to use Razorpay Pages instead of implementing the entire API, which was hard for me because I knew only the basics of NodeJS and hadn't explored any database to store the information. So I made a basic Razorpay page for payment and after the successful payment of the ticket, a QR was displayed to show the location. In this evaluation round, we showed them this feature, and they liked it but there was a problem if someone wants to cancel their ticket. Then what? They asked us this question, but we were unable to answer this and we told them that we will work on this. But our mentor/judge was pretty good and he understood the situation that we were in the first year and I knew only frontend React and the basics of NodeJS. So he gave some pretty cool ideas to implement using our current knowledge and skill level. At this point I thought, we had lost it because we could not answer a question and our project was also incomplete. But, then I thought let's give it a shot and start implementing the features our mentor told us to do. So I started to implement those features and these features were in my domain, so I implemented it and now it was around 4.30ish in the morning and I was exhausted as hell! I decided to take a nap because the final round of evaluation was on 26th after Lunch! Now, it was time for the final evaluation round, where we had to show the final prototype to the project. In the final evaluation, all the team members were pumped up and everyone was excited to show the final application to the judges. We showed them the entire project and the mentor I was referring to, who gave us some ideas, was pretty impressed with us because we implemented the same thing as he told us to do. There were some problems, that we needed to work on in the project but overall the final round went well. Everyone in our team was satisfied that we had given our best and no matter what the result comes we will have no regrets that we didn't give our 100%.

It was time for the results now, we were shifted to the BIT Mesra auditorium where the closing ceremony was going to be held. Now SIH has three prizes Rs.1,00,000 for the winner, Rs.75,000 for the runner up and Rs.50,000 for the third. And there doesn't need to be three prizes for every problem statement if they don't like any project in that category, no prize will be announced for that problem statement.

Finally, the announcement for our problem statement came and were the second runner-ups!! We shouted in joy, everyone was happy!! Overall it was one of the best experiences of my life. I met some amazing people, learned new things, and enjoyed every moment of the hackathon.

This was my experience of my first-ever Hackathon, thank-you you for reading my blog, I hope you find it interesting:)