I attended my first hackathon when I was in my 2nd year. I applied for this hackathon on devfolio and I was so excited about it. when I received the selection mail I was so happy. I and my other 4 teammates were super excited about it.

I am a student of IIIT Vadodara and the hackathon was in DAIICT which was very near to my hostel. It was a 36-hour-long hackathon ( Hack Infinity 3.0 ) and that was a great experience.

when we went there we saw there were lots of teams came from different colleges, some teams came from other stated as well, There were around 70 plus teams.

when we went there, we attended the opening ceremony of and visited the campus of DAIICT which is pretty good. we enjoyed it a lot. after some time hackathon started, we had to select any one theme and topic so we selected the topic of food wastage reduction and management.

Initially, I was so nervous as I only knew a few tech stacks like simple frontend, but together with my team, it became easy to make any solution for the problem. we thought of food waste reduction and management topics and decided to make a website for it.

Me and my one friend knew only the front end so we did work on the front end and other friends worked on backend and after 26 hours we completed our website and it was really fun, we didn’t sleep properly during the hackathon, and gave our best. then we made a report of it and submitted the form with necessary details.

after few hours they announced the name of top 10 teams that were selected for the presentation round, and luckily my team name was there, we were so happy but we didn’t prepare the presentation earlier so we prepared presentation very fast in just 15 minutes.

then we went to stage and gave the presentation. after that we could not come to top 3 but we were so happy that we even came in top 10 in that too in our first ever hackathon.

my learnings from this hackathon:

I really learned the value of time management and how to handle pressure while keeping a calm mind. I also understood the importance of teamwork and learned how to collaborate effectively. Working with a team showed me that together, we can achieve much more and learn from each other

• my advice to all the students is that never ever miss hackathons in your college life, u will really learn a lot, u will connect with like minded people and it will also open the gates of so many opportunities for you in the future.