Smart India Hackathon 2017 - Event

' Smart India Hackathon 2017 ' was  a pan India 36 hour nonstop digital programming competition . This was my first real hackathon and it was a  great experience. The Hackathon was something I was really both excited and bit nervous , excited from the thought of me and my team coding non stop for 36 hrs and competing so many participants from across the country & nervous  as being the team leader I had to oversee all the aspects of project from cloud deployment , to the main algorithm and keep everyone engaged as per plan . Another exciting thing about this particular hackathon was that it was a collaboration between Ministries of Government so all the solutions which had to be designed keeping in mind their  requirements and their real life impacts .

So from this experience I feel there are three things one should do before going for a hackathon:

1. Have a good team:

 You want to make sure you have a team before the hackathon starts. I know it's probably not feasible sometimes but as a student one can easily find motivated people who would love to give it a try. So I was part of a team of six  (Shubham , Pragya , Arpita ,Smriti , Sheryl  and of course me). This was the first hackathon for all of us so you can imagine the level of excitement.

2. Decide your project:

 It is important to know what would motivate you to work for 36 hours straight. The proposed challenges were posted Months  before the hackathon so this gave us some direction. We decided to work on Network Monitoring Solution as it seemed like a challenging problem and this was one project we all found ourselves agreeing on.

3. Prepare:

 I am not asking you to build the entire prototype of the system you plan to develop but definitely have an idea of what you want to do and how you are going to approach it. I think in our case we must have spent at least a few hours before the hackathon to understand the problem in detail and brainstorm the solution. And I am glad we did cause there were so many possibilities and questions that came to our mind while discussing the problem statement. So, before going for the hackathon we had decided what were were going to build, how we would do it and what tools we would use. The one of the biggest advantage we had was that we didn't bring much of pre-baked code which gave us the freedom to make changes in our application based on feedback of the Internal Evaluations  and inculcate and modify our application as per their specifications.

Anyways, once we reached JECRC, Jaipur ( yeah, that's where the event was) we were given our accommodations and badges and since we reached a day early as instructed to settle down and complete our registration The event was kicked off by a video of the speech by  Mr.Prakash Javedkar . Once all the talks and introductions were over it was time to code! Since we knew what were were going to do, we just dove right into building our project. The hackathon was a great environment to be in. No distractions and whenever you feel you might just be getting sleepy, all you have to do is get some caffeine / energy drink and look around. Trust me the drink doesn't do as much the enthusiasm of the people around just pushes you to keep working on getting you system working. Like most hackathons there were the regular 'evaluations' announcements and lots of food and I have to say I never realized how much it helps to stay awake!.

As the second day was coming to an end the pressure was building up and we all had to Submit our code to our  by 6 pm. Because of the time constraint and the large project scope we had considered, we didn't have much time to work on code optimization  but had managed to get most of the features working. So, the problem statement consisted of designing an bandwidth performance and analysis solution that can be deployed through the region at every POS  ( point of sale )  and making it friendly so that even a person with non technical background could use it  to diagnose connectivity issue ,

We developed an windows application that lets a  user check check his/her internet speed [Other features and design can't be revealed at moment] ...in short a tool for  assistance of employee to judge why the system is not responding properly to the command

Time flew by and soon we were asked to submit our projects for for evaluation. Surprisingly, we were shortlisted to present our project again. For me, that was a win in itself. Being shortlisted in the top 8 out of a pool of 50 teams in my first hackathon was just amazing. We had about 7 min to present all the features we had worked on and trust me it wasn't enough.

 Finally 36 Hours of continuous exhaustive coding and 47 of wake time without any sleep paid of .With us bagging the Second Prize with a Cash Price of 75k along with one of the memorable experience of lifetime.

What Next ....

Since the Aim of the Hackathon was to build solution to solve real life situations faced by Our Government with the help of technology  ,We among many other chosen projects have been contacted for further development of the products in collaboration ...and the wheels are in motion.