During the autumn fall mid in the November, while I was preparing for my midsem examination, I received a Whatsapp notification from T&P Club group that was about NITK, Surathkal is going to organize an student organized event named HackVerse, habitually i just ignored it. After few days one of my friends talked about hackathons on a call like “ Hackathons are the great means to make an impact on the lives of the students and also the learning curve students get by hackathons are immense and not to forget the experience - one of a lifetime in students’ academic life! “ till then I don’t know what is hackathon so it made me curious to attend any hackathon.
Another day I had received the same notification this time from Coder’s Club group but then I didn’t ignored it, I took some time and started searching about both NITK, Surathkal and HackVerse by this I came to know some interesting facts about NITK, it is one of the best NIT’s in India which has it’s own beach within college, with good atmosphere and beautiful campus interms of both nature and culture. I thought for a while and decided to participate in HackVerse’20 with one of my close friends Ram Charan. We both created a team and decided to submit the idea after completion of our examination.
Immediately after completion of our examination, we started searching about some interesting projects in Machine Learning and in our search we found a project in Airport Authority Organization and we decided to submit the project idea. Yes, we submitted the project proposal and waiting for result, infact we don’t have a hope on the selection for Hackathon. In the mean while in winter pongal holidays were declared and I was on my way to hometown, I just turned on my mobile data then I recieved a Mail notification, the time when it glimpsed on my eyes, i got excited and very happy about the notification…Well you understand the situation, your guess is correct!!..and the waiting is over.
Yes, we made it. We were shortlisted for HackVerse’20 among 2400+ applicants. It made us very happy and on the following day I got received a call from the Hackverse team, the POC(Point of Contact) Prathiki Goyal. she helped us in booking the tickets and instructed the necessary formalities to be done, rules & regulations to attend the hackathon. Infact her way of approaching, receiving , hospitality and organization made us think about how would be the hackathon the next day and our stay in Seshadri block, at first we are fascinated by the people present there and the night stay, cool sea breezes from the beach and our jeal and anxiety for the following day event which is constantly roaming in our mind, and the 24 hour journey tiredness which culminatedly made us to fell into the deep sleep.
The sunrise in Surathkal,followed by our breakfast on Jan’25. The day started with the inaugural ceremony. Notable folks from the industry shared their words of wisdom to the participants on how to be the industry ready through hackathons and other competitions.
After the inaugural ceremony, the following tech talk sessions were held there:
- Building a Search Engine with Elastic Search
- Best Practises for Using Containers in Production
- Being a Technologist in Financial Services
- Intelligent Things - How AI Will Be All Around Us
- Devfolio 101
- Why build on Matic?
Finally Hackathon started shortly, and we moved to classroom to set up our device. We are started working on idea, in between we took break for a while by often to play carroms, table tennis and talk to others. Atlast we submitted our project for evaluation and the judges quite impressed with our idea and approch in solving the issue. Even though we hadn’t won the hackathon we are happy because the hackathon was beyond our expectaions and we enjoyed every movement.