Chapter 5 of 7
sem 1, the comeback arc
hackathon era begins
built AcadZ at HackSynthesis, then didn't stop for an entire semester.
this was the comeback arc. time to get back up and be the 100x dev i was always meant to be.
it kicked off with Hack Synthesis, where we built AcadZ, a student focused mobile app. my first real hackathon. i remember staying up the entire night just trying to figure out how to call the Gemini API. completely fried, running on caffeine and vibes. but the energy was unreal and the food was biryani. actual cinema.
after that the next few months were all gas, no brakes.
hackathons. tech events. competitions. free food. fire merch. at some point i genuinely wasn't sure if i was going for the code or the coffee mugs. probably both. it was still one of the most intense, chaotic, weirdly beautiful stretches i've had.
if you want the full details they're in these:
but here's the tl;dr if you're lazy:
the season, condensed
- built Naval Vanguard with team WhiteSpace at a naval hackathon. maritime monitoring with LLMs, NLP, maps, threat analysis, the whole thing.
- got introduced to machine learning and did a Kaggle challenge, building a URL classifier with XGBoost.
- went to a bunch of tech events:
- ML Kickstart 101 at GDG HITK
- GameDev India Campfire, where i met actual indie devs and talked about my own stuff
- Blockchain Day, solved the challenge and got my first event t-shirt
- built Hacktivate at Hack<N>Pitch, a full stack hackathon management platform on Next.js, FastAPI and Hugging Face Llama.
- went to DevFest 2024. food, venue, people, all peak.
- survived Kshitij at IIT KGP:
- Overnite, a late night CP grind
- Zero Trust, where we made an AI fraud detection system with graph neural networks
- cooked up a dumb genius idea called the Brainrot Defense Mechanism Against AI at Abol Tabol, purely memes and chaos. got ohio-diffed. no regrets.
- at Diversion, my first MLH hackathon, built Cryptonian, a web3 edtech platform on Gemini API, Aptos, MongoDB and Streamlit. 36 hours without sleep with a killer team.
and that was just my first semester.
before this i was the quiet school kid. now i'm coding at midnight, pitching AI projects, shipping unhinged builds and hanging out with people i didn't even know existed a few months earlier. it's been real.