Hackathons: A place to learn, network, meet brilliant minds, have fun and of course, get freebies :P
I am writing this blog to describe my experience at a recently conducted remote hackathon at HackJaipur.

HackJaipur?? hmm…

HackJaipur is a community-focused virtual Hackathon, designed especially for the needs of the communities, with problem statements centered around the community itself. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, here is the perfect chance to hone and show your skills and witness the competitive yet inclusive developer community around you!

What interested me to take part?

Having never taken part in a hackathon before, I was eager to know how is it conducted and what can be done. Due to the covid-19 pandemic and lockdown in India, I had a good opportunity to take part in this hackathon. My main aim was to build a project centered around python as it is the language that I feel comfortable with.

Team building

I didn’t know where to begin!! Gladly, the moderators were kind, helpful and guided me on my journey. I posted my skills and my final team stood as follows:

• Pradeep Pradyumna
• Shivam Sherkar
• Harshavardhan Surisetty

Themes

There were four themes offered:

1. Diversity
2. Remotely Working
3. Tech and Health
4. Creating Awareness

Many ideas from face mask detection to a social distancing application were discussed, but we finally settled with building a Workspace Monitor System.

Project details

I will just summarize the main features here. The full description for the project can be found at WorkspaceMonitorSystem.

• We used the code for building an autotimer from this link as our base. The autotimer tracks the time spent on each application and stores the data in a JSON format.
  

• Next, we tried to incorporate a notification system for the application. For instance, many a times we tend to forget the amount of time we spend on Facebook/ Instagram or Youtube. So, it was necessary to add notifications highlighting the amount of time spent. This was achieved by using the plyer python package.

• Finally, we built a dashboard to visualize the logs. For this, firebase integration was necessary to send the data to a server.
  

Future additions?

We believe that these features are the most essential to make the system more effective.

• Addition of a total time key in the JSON data for each application navigated. This would help us to enhance our notification system by showing the overall time spent and not the current time spent.
• Building a login feature to improve security. Should be accessed by IT personnel and admins only.

Many features can be added and are found here.

Video tutorial

Things I learned

• It is important to participate in hackathons, even if you are a beginner. I would always shy from participating in such events as I believed that you need to be a super developer. No!! Hackathons are meant to learn new technologies from teammates, other teamsn and experienced mentors.
• The desire to solve real world problems.
• Don’t be afraid to reach out to mentors for help.
• Acknowledge your small wins and learn from mistakes.

In the end, I would just like to say that it was a valuable experience for me, made new peers and learnt a lot. I look forward to participate in many more hackathons :)

P.S: Please let me know if there any typo-errors or you want to provide feedback that would help me to improve my blogs.
Shoot me a mail here. I would really appreciate any positive or negative feedback :D