I’m just back from a wonderful Hackathon Hack on Hills last week, and I’m so happy that I was a part of it.
Hack on Hills is a 3 day Hackathon being organized by AppTeam in NIT Hamirpur, one of the top Institutes in India, with 6 parallel tracks including Blockchain, Javascript/Webapps, AR/VR, AI/ML, IOT and general. About 250 developers/students from all over India(including students of NIT Hamirpur) gathered at this exciting happening with a motto #Hike #Hack #Hashtag.
I was planning to talk about Cross-platform browser extensions or Web based AR/VR but since the organizers and participants were excited about VR I spoke about VR/AR. I was also a mentor and a judge for the Hackathon and that’s a story for the next part in this post.
I spoke about VR/AR, A little background and History of VR, I related AR/VR applications to movies(Remember IronMan?). I also talked about the blockers in the VR Ecosystem and how WebVR spec was able to fix them, Later I introduced them to our wonderful A-Frame and finally ended with live coding and demonstrating few live examples. I wish I could have done a few more live demos because students love code and demos. Here goes my slides.
This is my first talk after almost more than one and half year and I was really excited as if it was my first talk of all time. I knew the audience would be hard to deal with because most of the developers are students and in general it is hard to grab their attention for more than few mins( I hope the audience liked it 🥳).
Everyone was addressing me with Sir and I was feeling weird and asked them to address me with my name. Later, I got to know that the tradition of NIT-H is to address all the course seniors with Sir, I laughed and felt relieved, eventually got used to it. I felt it is better than calling Bhayya | Didi (brother or sister in Hindi) to seniors which students generally do in their colleges.
One Evening during the Hackathon, The volunteers took me around the Campus and showed me a beautiful sunset point. NIT-H is a beautiful place with greenery everywhere. One Fact that caught me was the Vehicles owned by Students are not allowed inside the Campus, So it was literally one of the most peaceful and colorful campuses I have been to. There was also a College festival at the same time and a number of other activities were happening around the Campus. Two things I remember is Someone made a Firebolt (Harry Potter’s Broomstick gifted by Sirius Black) and the Live music by the college students in their open-air theatre on the same evening. Not sure if it is the Weather or the actual music, I loved it.
Hackathon was really exciting and reminded me of my good old days when I was in college. The participants were working on distributed systems, ML, AR/MR, and IOT related applications. It was so good to see such exciting and powerful ideas converting into actual applications.
The last day was the toughest day of all. I along with two other Sahil’s( NIT-H Alumni and organizers/Founders of previous Versions of Hack on Hills) and Rajesh from HillHacks went around all the teams reviewing and evaluating their projects, asking questions, trying out their demos. I think it’s always easy to be a participant at a Hackathon rather than a judge where you should go around exciting products but couldn’t afford to spend more than few minutes with them talking about the tech stack or implementation. Time is a B**ch.
