Introduction

Hey everyone, this is Poulav Bhowmick, a front end Web Developer from Kolkata, India. This is my first blog and I will be talking about my experience at Hack4Bengal 2.0 hackathon, eastern India's largest hackathon, which took place at Sister Nivedita University, from 9th to 10th July.

Registration and Approvals

Our team had registered within the starting days when the registration panel opened, and were extremely excited. But as the days went by and the approvals started rolling out, we kept our fingers crossed to receive the mail of our approval. But unfortunately, we did not receive the approval, and when I checked the Devfolio dashboard, it said that we were not selected due to a large number of registrations. We were heartbroken, and the long wait of participating in this hackathon seemed to be shattered.

But something unique happened. On the night of 6th July, a core team member of Hack4Bengal, and a dear senior of mine asked if we were interested to participate in the hackathon, and I replied to him instantly. Then he gave us a google form, which we filled and submitted. This Google form was later sent to the discord server too.

Next day around 7 pm, I received a mail that our team was selected for this hackathon!! We were on the 9th cloud, so excited to be a part of it. We brainstormed all night, looking through the themes and deciding on what project we should work on.

The Hackathon days

The participants were asked to reach the campus within 10 am on 9th July, to complete the registration process and get the labs allotted. Me and Binayak, a teammate of ours, reached around 7.30 and completed the registration. Slowly more and more people came and the main hall, the labs started to fill up!

The opening ceremony took place around 11 am. There were introductory speeches by members of the organising team, like Manish bhaiya, Tushar bhaiya, Aharna di and many others too. There were also some giveaways from Logitech. The energy inside the main hall was going through the roof. Hundreds of developers, waiting to start building some epics stuff along with their teammates in the spirit of learning and collaboration.

The hackathon officially started after the opening ceremony. We were allotted Lab 7 on the second floor. We organised our working space, and divided the work among all four members. After some time, we were asked to come to the corridor area for some snacks. After that, there were various sessions organised by Google Cloud, Hyperlane and many other sponsors on how we can implement their technology in our project.

There were also several booths of Zeeve, Github, Hyperlane, the Graph India, where we could talk to the respective representatives and gain knowledge about their products, and also collect some cool swags, mainly t-shirts, mouse pads and github stickers. After spending some time there, we started with our work with full speed and adrenaline.

Throughout the day, there were food supplies, lunch, dinner, snacks arranged for all the participants, so that there is no issue faced by anyone. I have been to other events and hackathons, but the management in Hack4Bengal 2.0 was just outstanding.

After having our dinner, around 1:30 am, there was a jamming session with other team members and the seniors, and it was very refreshing! Throughout the night, the participants, though asleep, kept working, kept pushing themselves, with the motivation of building something meaningful and awesome, for the hackathon. None of our teammates slept throughout the night. We worked on our project, slowly and steadily reaching and ticking off our targets.

Next day too, we worked on the project, and submitted it within the given time. After the hackathon was over, judges came to each hall and we pitched our project, and idea to them and they gave us feedback, evaluating our project in the process

Our Project

Once we found out that we are selected for the hackathon, we had a discussion and all of us agreed on working towards the Education theme for the hackathon.

We built "InsightIQ", an educational platform where you get the best possible resources in the form of PDFs and Youtube Tutorials. There is a section where we intend to offer our own courses in native languages for those, who are not comfortable in other languages, and to spread the knowledge through our mother tongue. We also intend to help the underprivileged children, who do not get the opportunity to learn and grow like others.

You can check out our project here.

My learnings

Hack4Bengal 2.0 hackathon gave all of us a major learning, that is how to use the skills that we gain, in real life, how to collaborate with others and work together as a team, and mainly, the spirit of collaboration. This hackathon was an unbelievable experience and would always be remembered by each one of us. The exposure that these events provide is amazing.

Conclusion

So this was my experience at Hack4Bengal 2.0 hackathon. Hope you liked reading it. Do let me know in the comments about your experience, if you took part in this, or if you plan to take part in any coming hackathon. If you're a developer, you should take part in as many hackathons as you can, because what you learn from these hackathons can not be learnt anywhere else.