Behind The Scenes: The making of Hack-a-Sol
A written montage to Central India’s most ambitious hackathon
Coronavirus Disease, more popularly known as Covid-19 has had a huge impact particularly on the lives of students, such as me who yearn to be back on campus leading our normal lives, chilling out with friends in the canteen and what not. While that’s not possible, the post-dinner convos have now turned into Discord VC's and conference calls. It was on one such conference call when Shyam Agarwal, Tushar, and I were discussing what event should TSoC (The Society of Coders, IIIT Naya Raipur) should be conducting next. Tushar said that there’s a huge gap between the engineering graduates and the demands of the industry they eventually work in and suggested that we have an industry leader come over for a talk. And then we thought who could be a better name than Sandeep Jain, the founder of GeeksforGeeks, the world’s largest portal for computer geeks. Excited as he was, Shyam Agarwal asked his team members to hastily drop off a mail to Sandeep Sir.
After Sandeep Jain had agreed, I, Shyam Agarwal, and Ayush Mehar were in another conference call when we thought that his talk as a standalone might not be enough, and that’s when I suggested that we conduct a Hackathon and Hack-a-Sol was born.
But a hackathon came with a lot of problems, our Institute’s last outing with a hackathon was forgettable. Conflict of interests between the organizers and the college administration had ruined the experience of the participants. We were very skeptical that something of that sort might happen again. And I enlisted Shyam Agarwal with the job of dealing with the authorities.
This was the 26th of January and we scheduled Hack-a-Sol for the 26th-28th of February*
How did we begin work?
We divided the team into 3, namely —
- Technical Team (primarily responsible for the website, getting the hackathon up on Devfolio, and making the problem statements) — Varadd, Ishankaler, Dhaval Kumar, Rishabh, Shristy Kashyap
- Non-Technical Team (primarily responsible for bringing sponsors, and participants) — Avi Bansal, STAR GIRL SAUMYA, Yathin Prakash Kethepalli, Konica Ranjan, @kaularyan26
- Design Team (primarily responsible for making posters and teaser video) Ojas Ankit, Aaditya Kumar, Anisha Agrawal
We started off with zeal and enthusiasm, the website was up within a week, Shyam Agarwal, Ayush Mehar, and Varadd conducted interviews and recruited volunteers for the work. The fresh recruits of the Non-Technical team helped us bag our first sponsor, I roped in two judges, Ojas Ankit made the teaser video and we thought we were on the right track. But we had some quizzes in the first week of February and not much work happened regarding Hack-a-Sol.
We were now less than 3 weeks away from Hack-a-Sol when there was some problem getting it up there on Devfolio. The hackathon not being listed meant we could neither start the registrations nor the promotions. The technical team also had some problems and the website was pulled down. We felt as if we were back to square one.
Our faculty mentor was sad, he had high hopes for us. And this was when we started thinking of conducting Hack-a-Sol on Skillenza instead. But I advised Shyam Agarwal to rather talk with someone who had conducted a hackathon before and he talked to a core member of the Hack In The North team, and we decided we’ll stick to Devfolio. Fortunately, within two days, Shyam Agarwal again hastily ensured that the website (now on a different domain) was up. Also, the Devfolio team evaluated our submission and Hack-a-Sol was finally up for registration.
Less than 20 days left for Hack-a-Sol, but the problems were far from over. We received a mail from Team Hackverse (NIT Surathkal) and that was when we came to know that Hackverse-South India’s largest hackathon was scheduled for the same time as ours. And they had it up on Devfolio back in December. Honestly, for me, this was quite depressing. Scheduled for the same time, Hack-a-Sol had zero registrations till now while Hackverse had already crossed 1500 participants.
I was leading the non-technical team and was very skeptical if we could even bring in enough submissions for the judges to judge. It was time for a strategy revamp.
The final days
We revamped our strategy, the design team had to fire some of the previous volunteers and fortunately, the new volunteers that were hired in their place worked harder. We went from 2 to 30 posts on Instagram, in a matter of hardly 10 days. I got Hack-a-Sol up on as many places I could list it, worked on some SEO and slowly we started getting results. I was so contented when we received 100 applications on a single day for the first time. We also invited Mr. Gaurav Sen, founder of “Interview Ready” and “LinkedIn top voices February 2021”. Thus, we now had two esteemed keynote lecturers and two charismatic judges. It was time for the final showdown.
We closed registrations on the 25th of February, 11:59 PM. The day had finally arrived. There was an inaugural ceremony where our director sir applauded our efforts and wished the participants luck.
Winners ✨🎉
1st place — Team HashTera (M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore)
2nd place — Team Noob Coders (Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering, Mumbai)
Sponsors
Hack-a-Sol wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our sponsors, some of them were Matic, Portis, Tezos, Coding Ninjas, Axure, Echo AR, Infotech Solutions. Tezos especially has a super vibrant community. When I tweeted about Tezos being our sponsor, a Tezos user took a screenshot and posted it on Reddit. We were trending in that subreddit within no time. Also, the COO of EchoAR was kind enough to personally take time out of his busy schedule and wish us luck. I was moved by that man’s humbleness who despite being in the silicon valley talked to a bunch of sophomores back in India even after the time gap.
Hack-a-Sol stats
50k+ views on Instagram
40k+ views on D2C
30k+ views on Reddit
700+ registrations
from 150+ colleges
across 9 countries
100k+ worth prize pool
10+ sponsors
*If you wanna conduct a hackathon, I’ll suggest you start working on it at least 3 months before the day you’re intending. In our case, we had to substitute the lost time with sleepless nights.
I wouldn’t say Hack-a-Sol is Central India’s largest hackathon. After all, NIT Raipur intakes more students in a single year than all the batches of IIITNR put together, then we also have NIT Bhopal who has been conducting Version Beta regularly. But few would disagree that Hack-a-Sol is the most ambitious, having pulled off the greatest start that a hackathon could possibly have.
Until next time!!
p.s. Check out our Instagram for more: https://www.instagram.com/hack_a_sol_iiitnr/
Also, read technical blogs by our Technical Head, Abhik Jain here:
