Hack This Fall is one of the most thriving hacker communities. It encourages hackers to build unique projects regardless of the tech or field. After two successful years of hosting it online, HackThisFall 3.0 was organized offline at karnavati University, Gandhinagar from 3rd to 5th feb.
In this blog, I'll give a brief walkthrough of my experience at this event.
Day 1:
on 3rd Feb, at 4 pm I reached Karnavati University to see a huge crowd of hackers from every corner of the country attend this event. Among the crowd, I saw many faces whose work I had been following on Twitter and who had a great influence on the tech community. I realized how amazing hackathons could be for networking and learning from your peers! My teammates, Aviral, Vishwa and Arvind got together to discuss the project we had thought of building and how we were gonna execute it.
upon registration, we were greeted with swags from HackThisFall!
pic credits: @Rehankh24072002 Twitter
And after everyone found their seats, Siddharth Dayalwal began with the inauguration speech! and between 6 pm to 8 pm were scheduled two workshops from the two platinum sponsors of the event, 5ire labs and Storyblok where they introduced us to their technologies and how to integrate them into our projects!
Hacking begins!
at sharp 8 pm hacking period started and we began building while also interacting with the mentors and sponsors to discuss the ideas and get feedback.
after dinner, we had a mentoring session at midnight where mentors from each tech stack helped us figure out the project structures and executions and guided us on the difficulties we were facing on building. While at the same time, hackthisfall.tech/live was hosted on the screen where tweets of everyone attending with the #hackthisfall were featured!
throughout the night while we were occupied building their projects we had so much fun as there was amazing music, snacks and a karaoke mini-event!
Our project was to combat the waiting line patrons had to face while attending service-based businesses like dentists or barbers and the waiting line was always unpredictable due to variabilities. Our model helped them view and book slots and get a confirmation so they could attend on the scheduled time and also helped businesses track the traffic on their app on various days and weeks so they can arrange their utilities accordingly.
Day 2:
after a two hour nap, our team again started building. While vishwa and aviral were working on the backend, me and arvind were working on the designs while also trying to figure out how to integrate different technologies in our project!
on this day as well we had workshops from Postman, Apyhub and a snyk cybersecurity challenge and mlh mini event of bulding the highest cup stack.
Day 3:
at 8 am was the hard deadline to complete the project and submit on devpost.
after which everyone was free to network with everyone else, click a lot of pictures and roam around to see what others has built. At 10 am, judging round began and everyone presented their projects to mentors, with a 3 minute deadline to complete the presentation.
closing ceremony:
the award ceremony began and the energy of the room was electrifying! various sponsor track prizes from storyblok, 5ire labs, zeeve , apyhub etc. were announced before finally announcing the winners!
I got to learn and network with a lot of amazing folks from the community and the collaboration at an offline hackathon really brings the best out of you.
I'd like to thank Siddharth, Paras, Priti, Tushar, Prasan , vinayak, vedant, jay and all the other organizing members who devoted their time and hardwork in pulling off this hackathon so smoothly! It was my best first hackathon and i had a lot of takeaways and i wish to thank everyone for being so kind and appreciative of everyone at the event! onwards and upwards from here!
looking forward to winning at hackthisfall 4.0 !