This was my first ever Hackathon, can you believe it???

Initial Thoughts on Hackathons

As a student in high school, I have always been fascinated by hackathons. I had only heard about it in Hollywood references with unrealistic storylines such as hackers(or coders) gathering and there would be a huge competition where you would need to craft a solution to a particular problem.

Of course, the pandemic made these hackathons not possible in physical actuality, but that didn't stop the diligent organizers from conducting hackathons. They made it virtual so that anyone and everyone from all over the world would be able to attend, share and grow together.

The MLH discord server was my first interaction with the tech community and must I say it was a wonderful experience.

MLH Workshops

MLH had also organized workshops and mini-events during the hackathon for a fun-filled weekend. I attended the MLH workshop 'SelfieHacks: How to Collaborate with GitHub' where Harshil Agarwal(@harshil1712 on Twitter) took this hands-on session. This workshop was wonderful, and I gained a particular admiration for the tech world and its delightful members.

I learned about Git and GitHub and how to use VCS(Version Control System). This really helped me in my second hackathon, but more on it later.

Lookout for MLH LocalHost workshops. Most of them are completely beginner-friendly.

What we made

Okay, so back to SelfieHacks and what I actually did. I teamed up with one of my classmates from VIT Chennai, Fawaaz . We together built a telegram bot named 'Ongaku-chan'. It has a lot of commands, but the main feature of the bot is that you can pass in a song name or YouTube URL and the bot will send you the song's mp3 file in telegram chat. Isn't that pretty cool?

We used python to make this bot. You can check out our devpost here for more details like how we built it.

We even demoed our project in the Twitch live stream on MLH.

Final Thoughts

SelfieHacks was a great experience. It was super beginner-friendly and there were mentors available in case we needed any help with our projects.