Having passion and dedication about something drives us in many directions. The same happened with us when me and my friend Joji Augustine, “a team of two” laid our steps in hackathon organised by tnooz at cleartrip office bangalore. We figured out an idea last night and went for it with lot of enthusiasm. After reaching there all of us gathered in a seminar room, there were about 60-70 people and all of them were from reputed companies like Amadeus, Nibodha Technologies, C-soft Technologies, TripThirsty, OLA Cabs, Cleartrip, Yahoo, Armor Technologies, FindMyCarrots, PayPal and we added redBus.in to the list.
After the seminar we started working on our idea. Our idea was to built a real time group trip planning service that will bring people who wish to travel together into a closed group where they can discuss their travel ideas, details and can also create a travel plan. All these things will happen realtime so that the group users can get update. We were coding, discussing, optimizing and doing all the things possible for creating an effective and optimized solution for the end users. We were not there to just finish our project but we were there to build it in an optimized way as Joy is not in finishing the activity but in doing it.
We used technologies like Node.js and Redis for realtime communication between users. Also wikipedia pages were scraped and google api like search, images, maps, places were used. We also wrote some algorithms like finding the best possible order of cities based on distance. We will open source some of the algorithms shortly so don’t worry.
So our coding journey was going on a smooth track but half an hour prior to the ending time accidentally our main file got reverted. We got panicked and lost at that time as we were afraid that our hard work will go to waste. But somehow we managed and fixed all the things.
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. So at last we won the 2nd prize. We were so happy and had an amazing feeling at that time.
This was our first hackathon. We had an amazing experience and we are looking forward to participate in more and more hackathons. This is just the beginning.
PS Photos will be uploaded soon in this post itself.
Yet Another Geek 