team XCeption and the HackHeritage setback

just joined college. feeling good. best part was that the JEE grind was finally over.

met some cool people, and pretty soon we heard about HackHeritage, our college's internal hackathon that picks the teams for the Smart India Hackathon.

this was going to be my first proper hackathon. 6 people, 24 hours, overnight on campus. chaos.

building the team was a whole mission on its own. we interviewed people. genuinely sat down and conducted interviews to find first years with real dev experience, because we wanted a proper all first year lineup. after a ton of back and forth we finally had Team XCeption.

and then we realized we'd spent so long assembling the team that we had almost no time left to prep.

picking a problem statement off SIH's massive list was its own nightmare. endless research, zero hackathon experience, no clue what we were walking into.

HackHeritage had a selection round too. you had to submit a presentation pitching your solution before you were allowed to build anything. we finished the deck minutes before the deadline. showed up in formals. pitched early. then waited.

and waited.

then they put up the list of selected teams.

we scrolled. we searched.

no XCeption.

we didn't make it.

after all of it, the work, the team building, the pitch prep, we didn't even get to do the hackathon.

it sucked. genuinely broke me for a bit.

at first none of us knew what went wrong. looking back i can see exactly where we slipped. hard pill to swallow, but it was the wake up call i needed.

in school i used to think i was pretty good at this coding thing. college made it very clear that i had a long way to go.

still just one setback though. that's usually the thing that pushes you forward.