This weekend, a couple of my friends (Ashish Chowdary, Sai Kamma, Kunaal Kumar, and Adil Virani) and I attended HackDFW, one of Dallas’s premier hackathons.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with hackathons, they are 24-hour competitions where teams try to create something that will solve a problem. Usually, participants will create an app or a website, but sometimes they will use hardware such as Oculus Virtual Reality headsets or Raspberry Pis (mini computers that are programmable to do practically anything). After their product is created, the teams will present their project in an exposition to several judges. The teams with the top 7 scores from the expo judges then move on to the final round. Now called finalists, the teams are taken onstage in front of all the other 2,100 participants and given two minutes to present their product to a panel of celebrity judges and three minutes for Q&A.
After a long day of chugging red bulls, scarfing down various food items, grabbing all the free swag that we could, and creating a fantastic product that solves a real-world issue, I’m proud to say that we won FIFTH place at HackDFW and won $1,150 as a team!
This was my second time participating in a hackathon with my friends (Sai, Ashish and I made top 15 at HackDFW last year), and I’m super pumped to see what we’ll do together at the next one!
Also, thanks to Prem Malani and David Sohn for helping us load up on literally everything that was in sight!