How I am planning for my hackathon journey in 2021…
So to all the people who build and participate in hackathons or plan to participate from this year, we gonna go through my journey and plans for next season.
I started participating in hackathons recently and I am in love with it. Basically my first time experiencing a hackathon was in January 2020. Definitely the time before the pandemic switched everything to digital modes, that was a in place hackathon conducted in my own college.
That was a preliminary selections for the Smart India Hackathon conducted every year which begin from the year 2017. Many teams from pan India participates in building solutions for specific problems faced in industries. Specifically the problem statements were given by the respective companies and solutions were provided accordance to those problems. We participated in our fresher year and fortunately we were selected for mains.
We didn’t went through the mains, but we learnt a lot. I honestly had no experience with coding and I basically had biology and mathematics in high school. After that I had hard time forming a team for other hackathons and was pretty much team oriented and dependent.
The next hackathon I participated was this year MLH Girl Summer League. I had no team but i still made a decision to participate solo. Fortunately, the hackathon went really well and I end up winning a sponsored price. This changed my views extremely. The change was confidence and trust.
From that day onwards, I have started to participate every weekend in one of the hackathons. I am somehow addicted now. The community plays a big role in this, the people who have same passion as yours to build and make things that matter is so amazing. Its so important to find the right community to get that support and connection that you needed from the beginning. Having a good team matters, but it is not necessary to indulge in what you love to do. I gained confidence to work with strangers and form a team in the day of hackathon.
Now for the next season, I have plans for participating in hackathons possibly every week or two weeks. This season has brought my interest in open source too and I plan to indulge in some projects. Along with that I plan to make a wardrobe set of t-shirts and swags :)
Community plans a great role in inspiration and some mentors and other hackers helps in keeping the environment the way you wanted. Its absolutely okay to fail, because that’s the steps that take to to small wins and some achievements.
Again this year of 2021 will be full of hackathons, open source projects, collaborative projects and a lot of commits for me.
