My experience in HackVSIT-2k19

Hello everyone! Recently, I went to a Hackathon (HackVSIT) held at Vivekanand Institute of Professional Studies. Following are some memorable glimpses of the event.

My friend InquiridorTechie has already described a quick post describing the event nicely in a timeline. So I decided to write just about my top 5 favourite moments 🙂 Let’s hit the countdown.

#5 – Food and snacks

In short they were really delicious! We had a lunch, evening snacks, dinner, midnight snacks, breakfast and we enjoyed each one of them. Believe me, that samosa souce was exceptional!

I don’t know how to explain food times more than that. Moving ahead.

#4 – Ideation and naming convention

So, we were in hackathon opening ceremony and the hack was about to begin but surprisingly we had nothing in mind to work on. It is not that we couldn’t get any new idea to work on but it was more like, that we wanted to work on a real problem solving software rather than assuming a hypothetical problem and solving it abstractly.

We all were scratching our heads to come out with a useful idea. And after the hardwork of around 1 hour we finally come up with a new yet interesting problem solving idea (at least we, think it to be nice)

The idea being “reducing the hardwork of developers to make their custom dotfile setup by providing them a command line application that can do the work for them.”

In first thought it appears to be simply useful. You just need to run our CLI app and your dotfile setup is ready to upload anywhere. Hurray! Isn’t that great?

Now, the second thing was to give it a “name”. I always like this part. Soon we started to come up with new names and kept rejected each one of them. Later keeping in mind some useful tools like ‘kiwi’, ‘celery’, ‘redis’, etc we found out that it is a good idea take the name of any eatable. And first we considered donutbut it was already taken. After going through a couple of dishes we came up with Oliv(removed ‘e’ from olive). We all liked it and went ahead with it.

#3 – Gotchas with git and pip

The more you work with git, the more tricks and rules you learn. So, we were working on our idea and were using git/GitHub to organize things. Since we were commiting and pushing to a same branch so couple of time we messed things up.

I remember InquiridorTechie once commited in local repo without making the pull first. There we got reminded with the trick to undo a local commit that is:

$ git reset --soft HEAD~1

But the real gotha is this link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24568936/what-is-difference-between-git-reset-hard-head1-and-git-reset-soft-head, didn’t know about that mixed and keepversions of git reset.

You know the full form of pip? I didn’t know that but wikipedia says

pip is a recursive acronym that can stand for either “Pip Installs Packages” or “Pip Installs Python”.
Alternatively, pip stands for “preferred installer program”.

Also, any time I needed to know the version of a package installed via pip, what I used to do is:

• Run python CLI
• help(‘package’)

But GutsyTechster informed me about show option of pipnow I do like: pip show package🙂

#2 – Final and only evaluation

It was awesome! I never really pitched any idea and code before, like this to evaluators. We explained to evaluators our idea, problem statement, how it solves the problem and what tech stack we have used.

We showed them the working of the prototype we built during the 24 hrs hackathon. And we were happy to know that evaluator liked our idea as they said so. Moving ahead to the final and the best part.

#1 – Evaluators are coming!

OMG! What a moment it was! I and InquiridorTechie didn’t have any experience of having an evaluator that analyze code/idea/implementation and who’s knows what questions they may come up.

It was around 7pm when teams were waiting for evening snacks and it was around 8:30pm that we finally got it 😛 doesn’t matter for me, I wasn’t hungry. What matters to me is, the announcement just after the evening snacks that “Evaluators are coming within 10 minutes”. Oh really? Usual butterflies in my stomach, haha! How they are going to evaluate? My mind was rushing!

Soon, we assigned all of us some task to get our idea ready with implementation level 1, so that at least we can show something to evaluators. Though evaluators didn’t come up even all night, but that 1-hour rush was simply amazing. I think we did equivalent work in that 1 hour that we had been doing the whole day.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a great experience! I would love to join HackVSIT in the next year. I would like to thank each one them to organize the great event.

Thanks for reading!

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