My 6th Hackathon Experience & the Great Surgical Strike

This week I took part in another Hackathon, it was my 6^th one!! Last hackathon which I participated in, we were not able to complete the solution as we were working on really niche next generation technologies, and we did not get the required technical support on time. Out of the 6 Hackathons, I have taken part in, I have been able to complete 5,the one we did not complete, we did do the presentation and completed the participation.

 I remember my first Hackathon in 2014, it was a great experience and it encouraged me to keep going forward. I learnt new things with each participation, and also evolved technically, I also kept getting better. Every hackathon was different, with different themes and different technologies, some of them I did not even know the name of the tool\platform, and ended up using it.

This time around the focus was on domain and not so much on the technology. The Hackathon was hosted by the client I work for, which is an MNC in banking domain. We decided on the theme which was closest to our strength, we choose the user experience theme. We built a web site with sleek user interface to display the status of all our batches. ROI is, it saves minimum 3 hours daily and also has a huge user base as well who could use it.

I attended the demo call and got a chance to look over other team’s solutions. Couple of them looked extra ordinary and unfeasible in the allotted hackathon time (this happens in all hackathons).Some were really good and the effort was shown, some were good attempts, there were few no shows as well. Compared to others I had a very simple, yet very effective interface which suited my requirement. There was nothing to refer to for our solution, and we did brainstorming on pen and paper to choose the best design of the layout.  Time was invested to get the right placement of the components, and the color combination, in line with the assigned theme.

End of the day I was happy with what we had made. Even the next day, I was playing around the website, it is very user friendly and the color combinations are really good, we had invested time on it and glad it came out good.

Another thing I wanted to write about since long time is India’s surgical strike in terrorist hideouts in PoK. It was a bold move, it was a correct move and it was definitely a memorable day in the history of modern India. Hats off to the Indian army and also to the Prime Minister for this. The next few days were tense as well as exciting, but definitely the whole of India is proud and thankful to the army and the Prime Minister…Jai Hind!!!

Cricket, Kabaddi & Technathon!

To start with cricket, India tour to West Indies is going on. The ODIs and T20s are over and its now time for the test series. Test series is said to be the toughest form of cricket, I have heard cricket commentators and experts say the same since childhood. Only recently when I was paying 'World Cricket Championship 2' game on my mobile, I realized why it is called the toughest form of cricket. It takes lot of patience while batting, and you really need to work hard and play with batmen psyche to get their price wicket!

 Coming back to India - West-indies Test series. India won the first test comprehensively. It was definitely a pleasure to watch too on my big screen TV in HD. India won by an innings and 92 runs, Virat Kohli the skipper continuing his wonderful form to lead with the bat with a double century! All the Indian bowlers did a good job in dismissing the host 2 times with a consistent disciplined performance. The second test match started today, West-indies are batting first after winning toss, 3 wickets out pretty soon!

  Moving on to Kabaddi, the 2 semi-finals were played yesterday in Hyderabad. This is the 4th season of the Pro Kabaddi league.The first semifinal match was between Pune and Patna.  Patna are the defending champions from last season, Pune had never reached the PKL finals. It was a very tight match, Pune were giving Patna a tough fight, especially their skipper Manjit Chiller was in great form tackling Patna raiders. Patna team won 4 super tackles, which eventually made the difference in their 37 - 33 win.

 The second semifinal was between Hyderabad and Jaipur, it was north vs south.Being in their own den, I thought Telugu titans would have the advantage. However, Jaipur team showed their class, dismantling the titans to storm into the finals, 34 -24 the eventually score in favor of Jaipur. The final should be a cracker between 2 champion teams. Jaipur had won the first edition of PKL, Patna are the defending champions winning the 3rd edition which happened last year.

 Finally lets talk Technathon. I took part in this Hackathon at my office. We had to select next gen technologies, We had taken up IoT. This was my second IoT hackathon and fourth hackathon overall. We also attended prep training on IBM Bluemix, there was also Microsoft Cognitive services training.We decided to use Bluemix, we also used a raspberry pi 3, a light detector. Team worked really hard, we were able to install raspberry OS, and connect light sensor and test it. However we faced problem registering the device on ibm internet of cloud things website. There was not much technical support and it was an unknown area for us.

 On the second day we got an ibm contact to help out, but it was too late by then. We were already tired and sleepy. We decided to go ahead with the demo with whatever was done. Not many teams had taken IoT theme, and none we know of were able to complete the solution.The demo went alright, not great nor as bad as we were fearing. There was not much weight to completion anyways in the score-sheet. Lets hope for best, we will get results next week. Like any hackathon, me and team got to learn a lot. It was a fun filled experience and we did enjoyed a lot.

Amdocs World Hackathon 2014

I remember in 2011 when I was doing my Masters from Purdue School of Science. I was the CS Rep for IEEE, and there was IEEE international 48 Hackathon which was going to happen. I had to be part of the organizing team, and I also wanted to take part in the event. I sent email to my class distro. No one replied. I approached a couple of guys, but even they turned me down. I was a bit disappointed then.Come 2014, and life has come a full circle. God provided me another chance with the Amdocs International Hackathon 2014. This time I did manage to build a full strength team and submit my entry. It was a 24 hour Hackathon.

The date was 16^th September and the time 8:30AM. I reached the center and the instructions overview session was going on. It lasted around half an hour. After that me and my friend took a stroll in the garden to do some brainstorming. The theme of the Hackathon was ‘Internet of Things’, so we wanted to be out of office as it would enable us to see more things  and think of possible novel ideas.

We went to the office after that and had meeting with the team and finalized the concept and the product we wanted to build. We also finalized the business flows we will implement. There is a saying, if you have 12 hour to cut a tree, use 10 hours to sharpen your axe! All plans ready, we made arrangements for laptops to be used, and at 3PM we were fully ready, and started working!

The team we had, we are all good friends, and there was going to be lot of fun for sure. The primary aim was to enjoy and have a good time, along with completing the product. We coded all night, and we did have a working product with 3 business flows working as expected without bugs. It was more than enough. We had built a smart internet of things system on the cloud in 24 hours. We had also added decision making skills to it using AI. We were very tired, but the happiness and satisfaction took over more!

It was a great experience for all 5 of us: Atul Tripathi (Atul ji, Behtareen, Dhurandhar, ATITT), Saurabh Hote (Jaykant Shikre, Hotteeeeee), Rahul Singh (Cheetah), Vinil Mehta (Vats) and myself Kartik Vyas.  Thank you guys for helping me in fulfilling my dream, your support was exceptional and this would not have been possible without you guys! I will definitely never forget those 24 hours of fun and coding!!