I recently had the chance to attend my first ever hackathon. It was fun and challenging to build an app within a timeframe of 24 hours. In this blog post, I want to share my journey, the challenges I faced, and the valuable lessons I learned during this amazing event.
Beginning
The theme for the hackathon was FINTECH. Our team consist of 4 people including myself. We could use any tech stack we wanted and so we chose MERN. We had already decided on our roles beforehand. Two of us on the frontend and two on the backend.
Planning
The idea we came up with was a simple financial planner. Our app will collect user information like salary, location of stay, debt info, living alone or with family etc. from a form and divide the monthly salary into different fields to spend like Living Expense, Debt Repayment, Health Care and Insurance, Emergency Funds, Savings etc. based on the location they provided since expenses varies from location to location. This is shown in a pie chart along with the amount and priority.
There is a second part purely for investors where we collect the amount of money the user is interested to invest, ask a bunch of questions from which we estimate the risk tolerance capacity of the user and suggest investment options and how much part of the money to invest into each option. We decided to provide 4 options FD, Digital Gold, Equity Mutual Fund and Debt Mutual Fund. We also provide the expected returns and also the returns of a high risk and low risk option for comparison. We also planned to implement an education section which will educate users on financial planning and investing.
Coding
The most challenging and exciting part of the hackathon was obviously the coding part. I was in charge of the frontend. I used React to build the frontend. I created all the structure and functionalities on the frontend like form inputs, routing, sending requests to the backend, receiving the response and showcasing it as we planned. My friend was in charge of the UI looks. He was quite skilled in that area and it went without issues. We struggled a bit on the pie charts since it was the first time using pie charts. We tried a lot of UI libraries to finally settle on Material UI.
The tough part was the backend since none of had great command on Node JS. We also used Open AI's API for our app so integrating it to the backend was a task. Preparing the prompt took a longer time than we thought. I learned that creating the prompt and making it able to give the desired output in the desired format was no joke. We still managed to do it just fine. Using Node JS and integrating the Open AI API was a great learning opportunity. Even though we decided on the roles (frontend and backend) ourselves, we regularly switched between both for timely completion of our MVP(Minimum Viable Product)
Some of the features we tried to implement was totally new to us and this hackathon gave us a chance to explore those parts of web development. The organizers regularly provided us with suggestions and refreshments. There were a total of 12 teams and we interacted with them and played some games to charge ourselves up.
Presentation
We almost implemented all the features we planned and some suggested by our mentors. There were some minor issues in the response format from Open AI API but it went well. We were afraid whether our Open AI API will get expired during the presentation but fortunately it didn't happen. We had to also stuff some dummy data due to the time constraints.
The judge was a finance expert from a financial startup. The judgement was strict and he and other judges asked some in-depth finance and investment related questions to all the teams. There were teams with stock predictions, expense trackers, etc. Our presentation went really well, all the features worked seamlessly, crushing all our fears. My friend who did the presenting was really good with it and we also had a trader in our team so investment related questions were not a issue. They were impressed by our UI and the completeness of our product. When the results were announced , guess what , we got 1st place!!!. What a great day.
Reflections
Looking back, my first hackathon was an unforgettable experience. I gained not only technical skills but also a deeper appreciation for teamwork and adaptability.
If you're considering participating in a hackathon, I highly recommend taking the plunge. It's a fantastic opportunity to challenge yourself and learn from others. The fun and excitement is top notch. It also inspired me to write my first ever blog. Yes, this is my first ever blog. Who knows, your hackathon projects may even grow into successful startups. So just go for it when you get an opportunity.