Welp, where do I even start... We went with big expectations, having learnt so many new tools and technologies, but we were met with a lot of disappointment. The hackathon was supposed to be 36 hours long, but it was just 24 hours long, with a second judging round on the next day if we qualified. Which was quite goofy and unnecessary tbh. But we were quite excited for our problem statement, which was to build a collaborative coding interview platform with AI-powered features.
We had a lot of fun building the project, and we were quite proud of it. We built a real-time collaborative editor with syntax highlighting, code history, and advanced monitoring features like copy-paste detection and tab switching detection. We also integrated MediaPipe for eye tracking and built an AI agent to assist with scheduling interviews, asking follow-up questions, and providing summaries for both the interviewer and candidate.
The mentorship was great, our assigned mentor gave us amazing tips and feedback on our project, and he even liked it a lot.
The organizers tried their best, but the infra was really sad. The internet had some issues, but it was okay, the food was fine too, but the stay was quite bad. The college is super old, and the bathrooms were horrid, there were not enough mattresses for people to sleep, which was quite sad. I caught a cold due to the AC being too cold and blowing right on our faces, which made me absolutely miserable but that's not their fault I guess.
The judging was also really bad, there was a panel of 3 teachers and we were a bit slow to start our demo, so they were quite impatient and didn't let us explain our project properly. We took so much effort over 24 hours to build this amazing project, but they were rushing it a lot, and barely looked at it, they even told us to our faces that we should understand that they need to judge a lot of projects and need to have their lunch break, which was quite rude. We were quite disappointed with the judging, but we still had a lot of fun building the project and working together as a team.
I don't think I'll be going to TSEC for a hackathon again, but it was an okay experience overall I guess. There's still some learnings:
- Time Management: We need to manage our time better and not get too caught up in the details.
- Demo Preparation: We should prepare our demos better and be more concise.
- Jump right into the main features: We should focus on the main features of our project and not get too caught up in the UX flow, our implementation is what matters the most.
- Live hosting: Avoid using local tunnels for AI models, and just use free stuff like Cloudflare AI next time for deployment, use local stuff for testing and development.