About the Hackathon:

HackMol 2.0 was an online hackathon organized by DSC NIT Jalandhar. It was executed in virtual mode on Devfolio platform. It was a 36 hours long hackathon scheduled between 30 January 2021 at 10 a.m. when it was officially started and concluded at 31 January 2021 at 10 p.m.

How it started?

We started as a team of three where I was the team lead of our team ASCIIZ. My co-members were Vishnuvasan and Shweta whom I met via discord. We had a lot of discussion over our project idea and then finally we came up with an idea. We planned to build a portal where farmers can easily sell their crop to the right hands without falling in the traps of intermediaries and earn greater profits. Our team was ready with a designer, a backend and a front-end developer and we would develop our project on MERN stack.

Snap! Then we were two:

I discussed our project backend functionalities and other minor details with my team and we started looking for resources that we required during the hackathon. We were on our high to participate in our first ever hackathon. Then something shocking happened. Just before the event start, our backend developer Shweta just moved out of the project due to her personal issues. In addition, we were without a backend developer at a time when we were to give the names of our teammates.

Changing Roles to move further:

I was having a beginner level of understanding with PHP and MySQL and was learning NodeJS but not confident in it. So at that point, I just moved on to develop both backend and front-end by myself. Firstly, I tried to gather some knowledge of NodeJS and Mongo DB but that seemed just impossible to learn and develop the whole project simultaneously in just 36 hours. Therefore, I moved our whole backend to PHP and MySQL and started to code.

Evaluation Round 1:

The first round of evaluation was scheduled to be at 5 p.m. where we have to describe our whole idea to evaluators. If possible, we have to show them the work we have done until that time. Before that, we rehearsed our whole idea and created a presentation to convey our idea in better way. The whole evaluation round was fine and mentors mentioned that an idea implemented successfully can become a great product.

Our Remaining Journey:

After coding continuously for more than 6 hours, I was able to complete the login and registration system for the portal in both ends. I coded until 2 p.m. that night and after that went to sleep. Next morning I woke up at 8 a.m. and started the remaining portion of the project. Between all that, we were having Codechef hours of coding where we have to solve a coding problem. There were total six such hours conducted between the whole hackathon and it really helped to think for our project in a better way.

Evaluation Round 2:

Before second round of evaluation that was scheduled at 5 p.m., our project was more than 80% complete and just needed a few more functionalities. Also a little work on UI/UX was left. We rehearsed our whole project until that point and the future prospects. We presented our project to the evaluator and they suggested a few necessary changes that even helped our project perform better.

Hosting Our Project:

The final submission of project was to be done via GitHub and it even had an option to give the link of live project hosted on web or app store. It was not mandatory but accounted for additional bonus points that we help our team rise up on score table. However, we never had any experience of hosting a project on web with a backend. So it took around two hours to register for a few hosting provider, learn how to host our project and debug it.

Presentation Video:

In the final step, we had to make a video of our working project displaying its functionalities. The time limit for video should remain less than 5 minutes only. We both recorded our parts and tried to edit the video but the video was lost in a disaster and we have to rerecord it to upload on the portal.

Result:

The result was announced on the next day at 4 p.m. but we came to know that we could not make it to the top 15 projects out of 77 submitted for judgement. We were a little bit sad after that but then we counted on what we got from this hackathon. I almost learned NodeJS and Mongo DB in a day and to host a website on server. It was my first experience of a hackathon we learnt a lot in that period. We came across many great projects there and got a lot of inspiration from them to code every day.

The Project is available at https://github.com/yash0501/grazier. Do check it out and suggest a few changes and features that can be added to it.