Few words of experience at Pune Hackhathon
Before stating my experience(which is going to be pretty long), I would like to sincerely thank Vaibhav(Better labs), Shashank Date(Reevik Technologies) and all those who were involved in the organization of this event; it was a platform for people like me to boost our confidence levels by doing something like developing a web application in 36 hours.I also congratulate all teams for their best efforts in their respective applications.
the bottomline is that “The event was a grand success!!”
2 Weeks Before Hackathon (what the heck is hackathon?)
I heard about Pune hackathon from the PuneRuby mailing list around 2 weeks in advance of the event. The first question I asked myself was “Will I be able to develop a complete web application in 2 days, and if I have to then I better start preparing for it from now on”. Days went on, clogged in work at office and at home and as usual I just couldnt take out time to think of an IDEA for Pune Hackathon,
few days(3-4) before hackathon ( an idea to choose from a pool of ideas)
Managed to take out sometime after office hours and came with an idea to develop something for myself, Myself and my colleague Vishwanath came out with a bunch of ideas, but finally we chose Expense-O-Meter; being spendthrift, this would definitely turn out to be a handy tool for me atleast.
A day before Hackathon(Raring to go)
It was 22:00 hrs in the evening and we still hadn’t dicussed anything beyond our website name; We(me and Vishwanath) went to Cafeteria to discuss on what all features to have inside our website; came up with few while having an Egg Sandwitch(it stimulated few ideas as I had just spent few another bucks on it). Anyway our discussion went on for couple of hours and then we drove back home promising each other that we would give each other a wake up call at 06:30 HRS or so(I had hit the bed at 02:00 in the morning)
The D-Day
It was 08:30 and my alarm for some reason didn’t ring, similar things happened with Vishwanath, and thanks to Raingod for pouring rains like CATS and DOGS on the D-day. we managed to reached the venue at 10:30 and because of rains only few had turned up at 10:30. we waited for sometime, talked to Dibya, Shashank and Vaibhav on things related to ruby and RoR, explained them about our idea of developing Expens-o-Meter.
On your marks, get, set and go…..
Vaibhav signalled the start of the event,we went on to our workstations and right away we prepared an xls(I am good at it!) listing milestones with estimated hours.
On our way in Rails we learnt a lot of things in depth which we had covered in breadth before. things like using Ajax with rails, migrations, graphs in ruby, javascript etc. We modified the plan once every 3 to 4 hours to accomodate the slippages.
In between this intensive work, Vaibhav dropped in to share his views and reasons to host such an event; the primary reason being to form a community of real enthusiasts who could help Indian tech industry to move towards developing PLATFORMS along with solutions which it currently indulges in.
It was past midnight, and thanks to whistles of Akshay which kept us awake!
It’s a new day,
It was morning and we were still at Milestone 2 of 5 (5th milestone was real testing of the application); Thanks to Viki from Betterlabs from making our morning really good by helping out with kewl UI for our main page! the UI gave us a push and we were on the track and had quickly moved on to our 4th milestone, which was to develop reporting feature. we faced some problems while trying to use one of the Graph libraries of ruby and decided to work on completing other minor leftovers.
In the End, it does matter!
36 hours were gone, and it felt like eternity to me; we had actually done a LOT of things in last 36 hours.
Presentation and PIZZA time
Everyone started presenting their work, I was amazed to see the features everyone had in their websites, many things had happened overnight; DalalSTreet by Pratik for indeed impressive of all.
After a pizza break rest of presentations were done and it was the time to announce the results.
Shashank asked few questions like how many of us had used Rails/Testing features, to which no hand raised 🙂 the justification was that it was just 36 hours we had!
Our project being rewarded 3rd came as a sweet surprise to me;I am sure there was a very narrow margin between rating of all the applications which were developed.
here I am now with my msn nick being ” This spike is not going to die”, looking forward to enhance the application developed and putting it on to Internet soon.
The journey of the ruby merchant begins……
Yet Another Blogger 
Hey ! was I whistling… :-“
Akshay, wasn’t it you whistling the song Bheegi Bheegi see hai raatein?
Can you ask Vishwanath to send his complete details to me… for the PuneRuby prize?
Acutally his address would be same as mine, but just replace the person name Jitendrapal Singh with Vishwanath Nayak.
Anyway I would ask him to mail you his address.
Jatinder, looks like you folks had an amazing experience. Was this 36 hours of almost continous working or did u had sleep breaks? Looking forward to see your applications.
Well there was no time to take even a nap!
but we did had many short breaks to discuss the progress of the project and also to start afresh when we were stuck at a point for more than one hour.
About website, we hope to make it available to everyone soon.