It was lazy morning on July 6, when Facebook's "On this day" feature flashed a lot of memories from 2014. 

 Those memories were from an awesome Salesforce hackathon named "SummerOfHacks" organised in 4 cities by Salesforce in 2014. I was not at peace and was full of excitement, since I saw announcement of this hackathon in Salesforce blog, this was very correctly titled i.e. "Summer Will Never Be The Same"

The hackathon was all around recently announced "Salesforce 1" mobile platform. I was talking to friends, and peers on best ideas to fight for in that hackathon. Similar discussions with Adrian Smalley lead to an app idea for Sales guys to fix in-person meeting all within Salesforce 1. 

Should an MVP participate ? 

Many of my friends told me not to participate in this event, as I'm MVP and loosing by any chance will not look good. It was something irresistible about this hackathon, that I can't stay back, I wanted to live that moment and fight hard in my first hackathon :) 

Be a Judge or Participant ?

All that excitement came to stand still, when I got invite to judge the same event. Being an MVP, I was scared that this will end my chances of participating in hackathon. Fortunately, things worked out well, I was able to convince Salesforce dev relations and BeMyApp team, that I am still more of developer at heart, and would to enjoy the hackathon as a participant. Thanks to both Salesforce dev relations, and BeMyApp team, they cooperated well, and I stayed a participant. 

Excitement & Team was building up

Hackathon was during 18-20 July, and it was getting tough day after other to wait for the same. I found one other similarly motivated peer Kanishk Singh, who decided to team up with me, and fly to Bangalore for the same. 

And it started .... 

I left with Kanishk from Delhi early morning, we were wondering over a cup of coffee at Delhi Airport, what, how and all that.. 

Finally the time came, when the arena was getting warmed up, it was beautifully setup out there at Aloft hotel banquet @Bangalore (pics below)

We were hanging around, meeting other Salesforce developers, Kavindra, Raja rao, and of course taking some pics ;)

Bangalore got an unexpected response, and I believe it was first of four cities to sold out. It was an amazing crowd, noise and energy out there.

Idea Pitching stage

Finally  Raja Rao and Kavindra Patel started idea pitches. 

Soon we reached a stage where we had to present our idea on stage and because of too many participants the time was reduced to 1 min from 3 mins per participant.

It was quite a shock and quick change in plan, getting your idea communicated in that level noise and energy was really tough, I went up on stage and tried to communicate crux of the same asap.

After idea pitching on stage, all participants got some coins, which they can give to a participant with interesting idea. The participant with most coins stays and advances to the next step in hackathon. Each participant got plastic mugs labelled by idea #, these mugs are supposed to convince other developers and collect as much coins as you can from them :)  This was a do or die situation, and a strange mix of nervousness and excitement.

 What was next was toughest and one of the most interesting and memorable part of this hackathon. You need to roam around, and shout your idea loud, and collect some good number of coins. It was really shouting as noise and rush was too much to handle. 

No bragging but, I am soft spoken, and a shy guy, breaking this barrier and winning enough coins was a bigger job then staying up and coding for next two nights. Here I'm running around, and trying to sell my idea #1 :)

Following Raja Rao's tweet is testimony to that craziness :) 

All those pitched ideas are still live here in a google doc: https://bit.ly/bangaloreideas

And Coding begins...

It was a huge relief, when the uncertainty of leaving Bangalore on the same day ended.

We managed to advance in hackathon, and were able to convince enough guys, and collect good number of coins :)  

Coding Time

It was time to wear the beloved coding hat, and start writing some serious code. We decided to build a single page AngularJS, Bootstrap app on Visualforce. We knew that we will not code a full app, but a good presentable use case to judges, and were confident that 2 nights are good enough for us to do that. But but but, its not a fairy tale always when it comes to code ;)

Winning some prizes

To keep every developer entertained good arrangements were done by Kavindra and Raja, we had quizzes, code commit challenges etc and some prizes. 

Heated moments

We had a lot to do, and we're running out of time, those heated moments were there, when we had to make tough calls, to get that use case ready and presentable ;)

Fun moments & memories forever

I had a great time, met quite a lot of developers first time, and we still share good relations. Friendship becomes more special after dark, specially when you see someone working next to you after midnight. Following tweets will give you some flashback: 

Finally those two nights (Friday, Saturday) lapsed and we were approaching deadlines. 

Final Show Time

Two days were gone like a snap, and we were approaching deadline.

Judges were around:

Final Demo:

We managed to complete a good demoable use-case, and presented the same. Here is link to our submission: https://devpost.com/software/lets-meet 

You can find all other submissions here: https://sohbangalore.devpost.com/

Results

That was not our day, thus we can't win. That was little disheartening, but its part of game, as every participant cant be a winner. You can checkout and inspire from winning submissions listed here: https://sohbangalore.devpost.com/

Winners were our amazing community rockstars like Mohit Shrivastava with Sales booster app,  Karanraj with Hello Doctor and News Tracker by Naveen/Sudhir Kumar.

Life after results

We still believed in idea, and didn't relaxed or stopped coding. We managed to list the idea as a security reviewed public app on AppExchange, in just TWO weeks after hackathon. 

Thanks a lot :)

Thanks to Salesforce for organising this event, and giving us an opportunity to get this experience. This hackathon was a very good learning experience for me in many ways, like:

- No words to explain the whole hackathon experience and how much lively and entertaining it was.

- I was planning to learn Angular for quite sometime, but it never happened. But this hackathon, made me learn and develop a mobile first Angular JS Single Page App.

A big thanks to: 

- Dev Relations Teams Team (Kavindra, and Raja Rao): They were with us thru out, motivating, talking, cheering and joking around. It kept devs pumped and entertained.

- BeMyApp team : They were super super super cool and sporty thru out the event, even though not from India, but were able to adjust to time clocks, cultural differences and everything. I can't thank you guys enough during craziness of hackathon.

We want more SummerOfHacks !!

Hackathons are great, but I am missing them now. We want more of such SummerOfHacks, SpringOfHacks or WinterOfHacks events. Salesforce please plan for them, and I'm looking forward to be a code breaker, or a special weapon soon :)

References

• Summer of hacks announcement in Salesforce blog
• Summer of hacks official website:  https://www.summerofhacks.com/
• Summer of hacks, Bangalore Entries: https://sohbangalore.devpost.com/
• Our entry "Lets Meet" : https://devpost.com/software/lets-meet
• More Tweets with #SummerOfHacks