MY FIRST HACKATHON EVER
THE STORY OF HOW WE DEVELOPED A WEBSITE IN A DAY
I’ve always wondered what people actually do in a hackathon. As far as I knew, attending a hackathon meant busy days and sleepless nights (for the geeks out there who have an idea about what they are doing 😂). But most importantly, it’s fun time with our buddies and connecting with people from other colleges. And me and pals who just wanted to explore new stuff, felt it would be more like looking at other people work on their projects and eventually dozing off in the couch.
So last week, when the event of IEEE, Hack Kochi 3.0 came up, I registered for the Coding Competition. Hackathon was not a part of my plan then, cause I never really had the feeling that I could come up with any great ideas or work on them in a few days 😅. And just two days before the event, me and my friends decided to give it a shot. We formed a team of five and called ourselves ‘Bug Busters’.
It was a 48-hour hackathon. The first day was a Friday, so we had our online classes as usual. Half of our team were sure we were not gonna do anything (including me 🤭) and didn’t bother discussing it with others. And the funniest part is.. the rest had no idea that the hackathon had already begun 😆! On the next day, we were like.. selecting a theme is not that big of a deal right? So we just looked into all the given themes and ended up choosing ‘Personal Healthcare’ at around noon.
We were supposed to develop our product in the form of an App, Website, or a hardware. None of us knew the first thing about developing hardware, so we were left with the other two options. Our initial plan was to build an online store for Covid essentials 💡. But we didn’t have a clear idea about making apps either. So developing a website seemed like the best choice as three of us were front end developers (at least that’s what we call ourselves 😅).
After a heavy lunch, we put up a Google Meet to split our works. Two of us started working on the website while the others gave ideas on the design and collected data 👩🏻💻. By the evening, the basic info about the symptoms and precautions of Covid-19 were included. Then we focused on adding more features like buying Covid essentials, doctor-consultation.
The final and most challenging task was to make the website look cool. With my limited knowledge in HTML and CSS, I worked on it all night. I swear there was a time when I felt like throwing the lap on the floor jumping on the bed for a nap 😂. But in the end, when our website finally started to look like an actual website, there was a feeling that all the hard-work was paying off.
And that’s how our super-lazy team ended up making a website. Of course the judges gave us suggestions to make it better and tips to get a revenue out of it. But guess what.. they felt that our website was good enough to be let out in the internet for actual use already 🎉!!
Here’s the final website we made.. COVID MEDASS+
Now I won’t call this a pro website. I mean.. who am I kidding. I know this is nothing close to a pro website. But to us, what matters is that we finally did it 🥳!! So after this wonderful experience, I felt like learning more about JavaScript and I’ve already started working on it. Next time I’ll probably be developing a more interactive website using ReactJS. So stay tuned.. some fun stuff is on the way..
P.S. Remember the Coding Competition I talked about in the beginning? Well I ended up sleeping for almost one whole day from the hangover of the hackathon that I missed it 😂!
