Code with Aadhithyan

Hackathons.. oh Hackathons

Aadhithyan Suresh's photo
Aadhithyan Suresh
·

5 min read

Background Story

In the start of 2021, I found out about MLHacks, who organised a lot of hackathons for students above and below 18. So that got me interested, and I registered for their hackathons. The first one which I attended was New Year Hacks in which we were supposed to make a hack related to new year.

New Year Hacks

So i teamed up with a couple of people and built this site: nynm.co which is basically a tasks app which uses the google authetication to save your tasks. We used basic html, css, js and firebase to do this project.

While this hackathon was going on, I heard about a huge 1 week hackathon which MLH was organising the next week. So I obviously very interested, applied to it. This hackathon is Local Hack Day: Build which you can find more info on: lhd.mlh.io/build

My Experience

Hackathons were very new to me, in fact the new year hack was my first ever hackathon. I didnt know how to choose teammates, I didnt know how to collab faster, I didnt know how to take the project to production level in 2 days. This was what I learned from it:

New Year Hacks

  • Always find teammates from your Time-Zone. I found this out the hardest way possible. Even though we did finish our project, it was very hard for us to work together and make updates. There were 5 of us, and all of us were from completely different time zones. so take that in mind which choosing teammembers in virtual hackathons.
  • Keep the project idea simple In the starting we planned a lot, thinking of using the sponsored API's but we werent able to do that. so keep the project idea simple.

  • Have a particular theme in mind

  • Split work properly Split it out between the teammates so that everyone gets a fair share of work.

Local Hack Day

LHD is a week long hackathon, and you and your guilds are very closely connected, all points which you achieve goes to your guild, so keep that in mind.

In these one week builds, you will learn a lot and build a lot. My github activity blew up this week, it was full green the whole 7 days. Take rest, during long hackathons, its very easy to lose track and not get any sleep, but make sure your sleeping well and working.

Do not waste time. I wasted a lot of time researching on the best possible way to do it. Instead of doing it like that, just start out and make it better on the way.

What I learned and built this hackathon:

  • nynm.co
  • TicTacToe game (java)
  • Web Scraper (selenium)
  • Zoom bot (Automation)
  • Password Manager (python, mysql)
  • Encryption techniques (cryptography)
  • Morse Code Translator app (python, Tkinter)
  • Sorting Algorithms (bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Insertion sort)
  • Discord Bot (discord.js)
  • JavaScript Basics (New Language)
  • Quadruped Bot (Hardware Hack | Arduino)

Thank you

Thanks for reading all along! If you wanna contact me, here's my discord: SoulNinja#7777 And I'll catch you in the next one 👋

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