Dawn of my journey with Hackathons.

"Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life." is something that speaks all about my hackathon journey as a 1st-year student.

Everyone has heard about hackathons, this is especially true for a university full of engineering students, and after that much hype the most curious question is, "What is a hackathon?" and that's what came up into my mind, and Before this, I had the common misconception that a hackathon (hack+marathon) only involves coding for an entire day. Not all hackathons are about coding. A hackathon is an environment created, where several programmers come together to build the coolest stuff they can in 24-48 hrs. The hackathons give you the great opportunity of networking, a lot of learning, winning cool prizes and swags. I believe that "With code, we can make the world a better place by building software solutions that empower and motivate lives."

After so much motivation and constant support from our seniors, I decided to land upon my first hackathon, which was Code Innovation Series, hosted by IncubateIND under the Github Campus Program in Collaboration with JECRC University. The main motto of this hackathon was to ignite the passion amongst students to build a better world around us and support Open source across India and after finding out a perfect hackathon, the next step was to look around for an awesome team. And that was the moment when “Team Adyant” established, a team full of crazy, compatible, and harmonious people, consisting of Jheel Soni(me), Kirti Singh, and Aakriti. After an Awesome team, there was a call for extraordinary brainstorming, and as result, we came up with a mind-blowing solution. The hackathon proceeded with a few evaluation rounds and final results came, and after finding out that our team was shortlisted amongst the top 10 teams, our happiness was limitless, and my first hackathon taught me that hackathons are about management, brainstorming, designing, developing, deploying, and presenting.

After that, I motivated myself to participate in more and more hackathons, and after a month we hunted for another hackathon, Code Off Duty, a national level 48 hr hackathon organized by Developer Student Clubs in DSC WOW. This hackathon consisted of some amazing workshops/sessions. This was the place where imagination meets the technology of tomorrow. In this hackathon, we little grappled as we changed our idea before 1st evaluation, after clearing all the evaluation rounds and by constantly trying hard we came into the top 20 teams. Handling extreme situations, analyzing, thinking strategically, leadership was something I’ve learned.

After that, I wanted to venture into a global level hackathon, and for that, I aimed for Imagine Cup organized by Microsoft, which helps resolve some of the world's toughest challenges by passion, innovation, and code. It is considered as “Olympics of Technology''. Using our innovation, Strategy, and idea we made it to the regional level and got clarified for semi-finals but due to some of our weak points, we got a failure cum lesson. Here we understood that as first-year students, we need to acquire a lot more knowledge and skills to crack a global level hackathon so we rested for a while and explored.

After a little bit of exploration we got to know about LHD: local hack day hosted by MLH in collaboration with Developer Students Clubs JU and Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors JU, this was a prelim, clarifying this hackathon gives a ticket to Code-N-Build 2.0 another global level hackathon. In LHD, we were recognized in the top 10 teams and got an amazing opportunity to participate in Code-N-Build 2.0; this hackathon was a tech extravaganza with a fiesta of events, competitions, quizzes, and speaker sessions. After grasping so much knowledge we finally presented our prototype in several evaluation rounds and cleared semifinals, then finals, and secured 2nd position! After getting to know that, we were on seventh heaven. That moment was priceless for us, Team Adyant stood 2nd in a global hackathon. I was so grateful to have been a part of this event and being a team leader, I've learned a lot of lessons about managing a team, representing a team, I enjoyed equally and motivated others too.

After winning, losing, and learning in so many hackathons, I gained a lot and more on getting to know the real meaning of hackathons, ways to handle extreme situations, last moment bug fixing, time management, plotting & pitching, and a lot more. After these great experiences, I am aiming for more hackathons to come.

My suggestions to first-time hackers:

• Be prepared to be uncomfortable at times, and be ready to handle extreme situations.
• Be self-confident and self-motivated.
• Hack for a change, to motivate and empower lives.
• Team management, coordinating with others to work.
• Be innovative and courageous at the same time and pass with flying colors.
• Never aim at winning just focus on learning, growing, and enjoying.

Happy hacking!