The Intimidating First Hackathon
I’ll be talking about my first hackathon experience which concluded a few days ago. Hereby I’d be referring to three of my teammates Rutvik, Sai Ram, and Adil as X, Y, and Z for easier comprehension.
PART 1: What drove us to participate in the hackathon?
Before a few months, the first edition of the HCL Hackathon concluded with a prize pool of $2500 and summer internships for the note-worthy participants. One of my friends who’s team was placed 2nd enticed us to take part in the hackathon as we’d have nothing to lose and rather get ourselves some experience and rid of the stage fear and, obviously there was prize money too. So, I and 3 other friends of mine decided to form a team, registered for the hackathon and, started brainstorming a few ideas for the hackathon.
Coming to technical details of the hackathon, It was based on the theme ‘gaming’, meaning we had to provide an idea that would profit or help tackle the problems in the gaming industry. By the end of the week, we all fixated on one idea which we thought had the potential to win the Hackathon and, also benefit the industry. After a tedious wait of 2 weeks, we’ve been informed that our idea was a part of 9 ideas that have been selected for further review out of around 150 posted ideas. We felt delighted about hearing this and all that was left was one more compelling round except this time we had to implement a working POC of the idea.
PART 2: It’s research time
The four of us assigned ourselves different tasks that would progress the idea. The solution was based on machine-learning. So, the first step as any beginner would know was to collect or scrape the data from the web. One of my teammates X took care of it, he sourced the data from Kaggle and an old archive from google. Two datasets as we planned on creating two different models for giving a solid and versatile POC.
The data gathered was unstructured and was in the form of log files which we had to clean to advance to the next stage. So, One of my other mates Y took charge and changed the whole look of the data. He converted the log files into an SQL database which could be imported and worked on for machine learning purposes.
Z was working on a business pitch about how it would bring profit to the gaming industry and the ROI’s if this turned out to be a startup just like ‘Shark-tank’ pitches.
On the other hand, I was focusing on how to build the model, what libraries to use, and what features would make for the best possible outcome. I started exploring articles on Google and I was directed to Medium where I found few good features and feature engineering niches for my model. I consulted my teammates and further tweaked the features so as to get a decent solution. While coding the model, stack overflow and the documentations helped me get past the hurdles in the quickest possible way. I’ll be honest here, I pasted a few bits of the code directly from the stack and I don’t feel guilty. As they all say, ‘Good coders code, Great coders steal’.
All that was left now was to somehow show that our model works in real-world scenarios, hence teammates X and Z started working on developing a website that would replicate the real-world use cases. Just before the finale, we had 4–5 dry runs and became confident enough to give the judges a great pitch.
PART 3: The grand MS.Teams Finale
We knew beforehand that we had to pitch our idea online because of the current situation(Corona). We felt it’s gonna be easy just like all other virtual events.
I’ll assume that everyone reading this article knows or has experienced final day blues. Even though we went through our presentation and idea more than 5 times, we were all flustered 30 minutes prior to our pitch. It’s natural to be tensed considering many people have stage freight.
We switched on our mics and cameras and, I felt the weight in my lungs with all these pessimistic thoughts about how I’m gonna ruin our chance of winning while I detailed the backend. During the need of the hour, I didn’t chicken out. I made myself confident by looking at all our efforts and the pitch it deserved. By the end of the presentation and POC, we took up and answered every question related to our idea and even grabbed a few suggestions to improve the model.
TAKEAWAY
- Work for the team and with the team as Michael Jordan once said - “Talent wins games but teamwork wins championships”.
- Always divide the tasks among yourself rather than taking it all upon you or rubbing it on your friend. Every single effort counts. If you don’t contribute you clearly don’t deserve it.
- Lastly, don’t give up even if you feel like you’re getting nowhere. More research gives you more certainty and acts as an impetus.
P.S: We didn’t win the Hackathon but we did have a great learning opportunity which in itself is an incentive to take part in the first place.
