All the way from Bahrain to Jeddah

My First HACKATHON EXPERIENCE ! #Hajj_Hackathon

[From 600+ to top 100]

A LINKEDIN post by Startup MGZN on 15th july 2018 was the start to my journey to participate in the first ever Hackathon dedicated to HAJJ.

I didn't have much coding experience,

so attending a hackathon sounded like a painful and embarrassing situation but the willingness to explore more in the entrepreneurial journey forced me to apply for an Hackathon for a very first time.

Thankfully,

After getting shortlisted I decided to attend Hajj Hackathon 2018 and ended up having an amazing time there.

This was the First largest Hackthon ever happenign in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia (Jeddah).This year, over 2950 Coders, Designers & Entreprenuers attended the event. When we first checked in, we were immediately welcomed by the super friendly organizers.

Technology legends Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., and Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, joined the thousands of tech acolytes on Tuesday night at the official opening ceremony of the first Hajj Hackathon

the event was held at the Jeddah International Exhibition & Convention Center, Saudi Arabia and organized by Saudi Federation for Cyberescurity, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP) and supproted by GOOGLE.

There was huge space for all of us to get comfortable and ready to learn, code and innovate.

Before the opening ceremony, we were given an abundance of cool multiple shirts, pens, notebooks, and dozens of laptop stickers.

Despite the friendliness of everyone around, I was still nervous about the hackathon as i was yet to form a team just few hours before the official start of Hackathon.

Fortunately a breakfast networking chat with other participants and having similar concepts in mind i was able to form a team.

Luckily, Me & Ahmed from SriLanka found 3 other members who were happy to join our team.

My team was the most unique as were were all from different parts of the world. We had members from UK, Syria, Tunisia, SriLanka and myself from Bahrain.

We were a team of 3 developers 1 designer & 1 entrepreneur. 

They were super nice and we worked well together the entire 36 hours taking short nap breaks for 20 minutes in between.

As a team, we created FLOW - Crowd Visualization on your fingertips, which was an app to help the pilgrims to understand the crowd situation of different locations visually. 

To use our app, one would just install it and understand the crowd situation at different locations like Makkah, Medina, Arafat, Muzdalifah, Jamarat and mina simply thorough colorful signals. The app would also send instant notifications to the cellphone users in case of emergency, displaying them in a drop down menu.

The users could easily select their location of choice and FLOW would draw the crowd status depending on different hours.

HAJJ HACKATHON was awesomely great in so many ways. I really enjoyed meeting and working with other teammates whom i learned more about coding from. As I settled in and got more comfortable, I realized that there was nothing to be worried about. Everyone was extremely helpful and supportive whether it be the organizers or the officials.

If incase we had any problem there was always a mentor to assist us. There were also numerous workshops, from UX/UI design to machine learning.

It was eye-opening to have so many role models and mentors.

I did not have any expectations for our app — I just wanted to grab more knowledge from that event. Therefore, my team and I were astonished and super excited when our app FLOW was shortlisted amongst 600+ teams to top 100 teams, It was so rewarding to be recognized for creating something in 36 hours.

The great hospitality by the organizing committee made this event more joyous and memorable.

With 2,950 developers in attendance, the Hajj Hackathon in Jeddah officially broke the Guinness World Record for most participants in a software development jam in a Hackathon. All the participants will be granted with the Guinness World Record Recognition and that was something really unexpected.

Being a part of this experience has given me a new outlook on the blend of Entrepreneurship & coding.

I would personally like to thank everyone who made this event possible, all the sponsors, and everyone those who attended . I’m so glad I had this opportunity, and it won’t be one I will forget!

I would definitely recommend anyone in the tech community to attend a future Hackathon.

you never know who you could meet or what opportunities could arise from it.

But most importantly you don’t need to be a ‘computer-expert’ to attend, so there is nothing to be nervous about! If you've never coded before, it’s a great opportunity to acquire new skills.

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