Womandroid Hackathon 2019
GDG Bangalore and TrueCaller organised the first Hackathon for women which was called the “Womandroid” exclusively for women who are adventing in the technological field . Womandroid supports women empowerment and hence the title was Womandroid.
I came to know about the event from Meetups.com and I was quite captivated by the idea of it.So,I applied and luckily my application got selected.So,it was all set. I got my e-ticket and it was time for me to head to Bangalore.The hackathon was a free one as in we need not pay any registration fee in order to participate in it.It was a 2 day hackathon ( not 24 hours) on February 16 and February 17 .
Womandroid was a Android development Hackathon and we were asked to deploy apps that bestowed women empowerment.
I’m very much a feminist that way and I decided to give my best to it.Teams were decided on spot and they made sure it was blend of skills . Neither everybody was a expert nor everybody was a novice in a team.
So, to take you through the agenda, the coding period started at 10.30 , lunch at 12.45 and then coding till 6 on the first day.Pretty much the same on the second day as well except we had to end coding at 3 and present our ppts at 4 .
I had gone to the venue at 9 am and the first impression of the office left me awestruck.I got my tee , had a little boost up breakfast and started communicating with the other coders.Luckily, everybody were amicable and I did not face a tough time in making friends.So, we all pitched into the actual venue for coding which is the top floor of CoWrks and started skimming through the House Rules which they had given us. The rules were pretty simple
Rule 1 : App should empower women.
Rule 2 : It is mandatory for each one of the team mate to talk during the presentation
Rule 3 : The presentation time should not exceed 3 minutes which also includes a demo video of the app.
Rule 4 : We can use any language depending on our requirement like Java, Kotlin, React Native or Flutter.
There are the rules I remembered and these were the ones that mattered , the rest were the recurrent ones that everybody sees in every hackathon.
The teams were divided, coffee was filled in the cup and now brainstorming started!!!!
Each team consists of 4 members and not the last team had 5 as only one person was left out. We decided on many ideas and the topics that were hot potatoes . Finally after spending the whole afternoon,we had come up with the idea that the app would focus on women from the rural areas who are unaware of healthy foods especially during pregnancies which eventually leads to miscarriages. As I Googled through the prominency of the idea, I found out that this is a pretty good idea and I gave a Thumbs Up to it.All other team mates agreed too and so we decided to proceed to that idea.
Time passed by and we started devoting ourselves to the project . It was very hard to implement such a huge project in 2 days of time so we decided to clone a similar kind of app from Github and them renovate it with our ideas.It was really a tough time to find a idea that would atleast partially match with our idea but finally we did find one. It was kind of justifying our idea and we decided to take that project further. The House rules mentioned that the UI mattered so I undertook it and worked on that.The job was equally divided . I took UI where as the other girls took Database and Firebase. Meanwhile amidst coding hours we had online games and snacks to refresh us and I had won Rs.1000 on a TrueCaller quiz (:D,Yayy). Lunch was served at 12.45 and we decided to have a quick lunch and come back and resume our coding . We coded till 6 in the evening. Almost one half of the app was done but still a lot of work was left out. So, I took the charge of completing 3 activities of UI before the next day so that at least some of the load is reduced.
But, as I reached home I dozed off.Next day, I came early,ate breakfast and stuck my butt to the chair and started to code.Before my other team mates came I finished the activities I promised to do . Later on they joined and we finished of the work with decently structured code .But the app was not running as per our desire. Again after contemplating for a long time , we could bring it into form.We didn’t realize it was past lunch .. so we had a quick power bar kind of lunch and started to work on the presentation.
Earlier in the morning of the final day I spoke to the Host and the Judge, they told me that the code was not important but the presentation and how much it justifies the title that is women empowerment and a working model of the app is always a plus! I reciprocated the same to my team members and eventually we could show all our efforts through our presentation.The other team mate and I did the whole presentation while the other two were focusing on how better they could modify the app. Though it was not a app from scratch we had to make a lot of changes according to our feasibility and that did take a lot of time . Coding period got over. All that humongous amount of coffee, hot chocolate and tropicanas did pay off a little. Before 4 pm we sent our power point presentation through slack( communication channel) . 4.20 pm was presentation time. Fortunately, I did not have stage fear and that helped me participate in a few orating competitions in my school days. Again, the whole presentation was split between the four of us . I gave the introduction, while the others walked through the functionalities of the app.Finally, everything on our side was done , now it was all left to the jury to decide the winners.Till then we kind of relaxed , wandered around the place and took a lot of pictures we were craving for since we entered the place.The results were announced and the Hackathon finally ended with me learning a lot of tech stuff , communicating with a lot of developers and ofcourse savoring the spectacular ambiance of the office.
In a nut shell, it was certainly an amazing experience with a lot of learning curve to it and I shall cherish every bit of it in the forth coming days.
Thank you GDG and TrueCaller for giving me this opportunity .
Hurray …to Women in Tech and to more and more Hackathons like these!
Bhavna.
