My First Hackathon Experience
Competing hasn’t always been my thing, even if i get the opportunity to compete, i’d always find an excuse not to. why? because i always think i’m not good enough. So, after seeing a lot of people talk about “overcoming imposter syndrome”, i decided its high time i battle the gentleman(imposter syndrome).
One cool afternoon, while scrolling through my whatsapp group-chat messages, i came across a link to participate in Flutter Wave Student Hackathon. The old me would have just clicked the link and just scroll through the website, but i decided to not just click, but also register.
on getting to the venue for the Hackathon, i started seeing familiar faces. Not just familiar faces, but faces of people who i actually know are way pass me in tech. Trust me, i was minutes away from deciding to leave the venue. Eventually i decided to give it a shot. we were told to join a team, i bet you it wasn’t an easy task, as people were either looking for experts in Frontend , Backend and Design. long story short, i finally found a team who needed a frontend guy.
We started brainstorming on ideas that can be implemented in less than 30+ hours. we finally settled for a medical appointment app that allows users too book appointment based on doctors availability. users would receive a call as a reminder, a day to your appointment and a Google Calendar notification. tasks were shared and my task was to handle the frontend part of the webapp. While discussing about the project, i got to know about some really cool technologies:
We all departed with tasks to work on before the next day(yeah, it was a two day event). Over the night, i worked on coming up with a design, because with didn’t have a designer on our team. I also worked on the landing page over the night, leaving the rest of the tasks for the next day.
Day 2 I started with coding the login page and finally moving over to the Sign-up page. It was already time to push the code to github and we weren’t done. We were facing some Api related issues. As a team all other things were handled by others, the backend and slide presentation. We merged the code and submitted.
It was time for pitching, our team was called upon, we were given 10 minutes to present. The team lead made the presentation. The judges asked few questions(i was scared and nervous on the inside) and made some contributions.
When competing in teams:
- Have good presentation
- Make sure all the team members understand the whole idea of the product, as questions could be thrown at any of you.
- Confidence.
After so many presentations from different teams, it was time to announce the winner!!!
Results were out and we didn’t make it to top 3, but the experience was worth it.
Thanks For Reading.
