My First Hackathon Experience

Last weekend has been one of the most exciting of my life. What so exciting? What so interesting ? Yes its all the great Summer Of Hacks a Hackthon event in banglore conducted by Salesforce.

Woaaahhhhh three days of continuous coding. Hack Hack Hack !!!

Day 1:[Networking and Coding]
We reached the venue early and that gave us a very good chance for handshakes with the Great MVPs Abinav Gupta(Force.com MVP) and  Shivnath devinarayanan (Salesforce MVP). You don’t know how much energy we get by seeing the salesforce community. Wooahh It was awesome.



Note: So reach a venue earlier and get a good hot handshake and collaborate and also to mention events like this give us a chance to meet the MVPs and you know I met them after two years.

Well ! Next it was a welcome note given by the energetic Kavindra Patel. Then every team had to submit their ideas and then vote for others. Around 72 ideas pitched in the event and in that 27 teams are formed based on idea voting. And you know this voting idea is great, because it gives you a chance to collaborate with each and every participant in the event. Happy to say that my idea also got selected in the top 27 team.The team registration task has to be completed before 12 AM.Git-hub private repository was provided to commit our projects. Then We registered our team in the challengepost and collected the summer of hacks t-shirts. So basics are done, now starts the race. Yes overnight coding begins, awesome energy faces, serious faces , awesome environment around you all techies coding coding and keeps coding even till 5AM. Then I took a small nap.

Day 2:[Fun and coding]

I woke-up by 7AM and got refreshed in the hotel. Then we had breakfast with coffee and started our coding. By 10AM Raja Rao kick started his presentation on salesforce1 platform for the developers. Once after the session we had a twitter challenge and awesome goodies(I love salesforce goodies) distributed for the winners. Then we had lunch and non stop coding begins,then sharply by 3pm first git hub commit challenges begins every team have to commit theirs in their repository before 4pm else team submission won't be considered for judging, every team committed there code on time. Then at 7pm we had one more twitter challenge, all developers actively answered the question using the hastag #SummerofHacks.



Then time for dinner and the fun begins they conducted twitter selfie context we have to take a selfie as many as possible and post it in twitter using hastag #summerofhacks and many developers won awesome goodies. Then Over night coding begins.

Day 3: [ Final day coding]

Developers are coding so hard to compete with others. We had second git commit challenge by 10 am after that developers started polishing their application and started preparing for the presentation. We have 3 minutes to present and 2 minutes for the Q&A. Salesforce team gave enough tips and tricks about presenting to all the teams individually, it was really helpful for us to prepare and present in-front of the judges. Then by 12 pm final git commit count down begins, we have to commit our final version of the code with all the necessary components before 1 pm All team finally made it sucessfully. 40+ hours of coding came to an end.

Time for Demo:
Yes now its time to show our 40+ hours hack in-front of the judges and audiences. Kavidra Patel introduced all three judges Ankit Arora(Force.com MVP),Jesal Mehta (Apttus) and Pavaman Prasad(Salesforce product partner) Luckily we are the first team to demo our hack, we were little nervous to present but you know we successfully made it. Many awesome and interesting application are demo during the hackathon. It went up to 5 pm, then judges left the room to decide the top 3 teams.The results are expected to be announced by 7 pm till then we had many fun activities cloud trivia , twitter challenges and almost all developers won awesome goodies.

Here comes the climax, Yes our winners are,

1st Place : Sales Booster
2nd place : Hello Doctor
3rd Place: Clients-News-Tracker




I am very happy and proud to say that we won the second place for our Hello Doctor App.
Please take a look at the other awesome submissions here. And one thing to say, I dint participate hackathon to win cash prize and that is not what they are about. You need to say hackathon as an opportunity to learn and meet new people. Proud to say that I won the knowledge of salesforce1 and that’s the enthusiasm of all the developers who participated. Its not winning and its all learning and collaborating and that’s the theme of it. Hackathons are awesome and make sure you go at-least one.

I want to thank all the BeMyApp and Salesforce Summer of Hacks team  for their continuous support on making this event a most energetic and successive. You know they were available for all time and helped us in every single way and they are so awesome with full energy. And needless to say that is where lies the success of the salesforce community – Helping Hands, Energetic MVPs, lovely Goodies and Happy coders !!!

I thank Salesforce for conducting this event and it has created a very good feeling on the fellow coders . I hope this event has created a very good impact on the Indian developers. I request salesforce to conduct events like this and its good chance to meet the great MVPs and fellow salesforce developers.

We are salesforce.com developers!!! We love you salesforce

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