“What The Hack 2.0 “ – It was the first time for Akshay Ramesh, Sushama Shadakshary, Pranjal Chugh, Shubham Raj and me to experience a 28 hours of Hackathon. Despite being fledglings to SAP technologies, we pushed ourselves to the coding marathon and were all geared up for the event. Eventually, we walked away with handful of memories, learnings and a great experience.
A new idea that we submitted, got shortlisted and that built in us, enough confidence to take up the challenge. The idea was to design an Android app that makes “Smart Shopping” feasible. We proposed a solution that would solve the problem of long queues which we often see in malls. It also provides offers specific to customers based on their history of purchase. The solution was meant to extend the functionality that would enable the retailers to know the customer’s purchase pattern and in turn position the shelves accordingly.
“Beautiful weather and code on our minds”. The event witnessed 142 teams and the ambience gushed out with enthusiasm. All the teams were excited about the coding-race. This time the college students were allowed to take part in it, letting the young talents compete with campus geeks and showcase their coding skills. It indeed was a great exposure to them. The kick-off started at 5pm and ended with Dilip Kumar Khandelwal, Managing Director and Srikanth Gopalakrishnan, Vice President, Products & Innovation addressing the gathering.
Finally, the much awaited moment had come!! It was 6pm when we were supposed to start our coding. It was time for us to put on our thinking caps. Things seemed to work fine for few hours. But later, we were stuck at a point with authorization related issues on HANA systems, because of which we couldn’t move ahead. We were disappointed for a while. May be it was the lack of experience and expertise that we couldn’t reach our goal. Not only the coding prowess, but also we require proper design and planning, that puts us in winning boats.
Experiencing such a huge marathon for the first time at SAP Labs India was simply amazing. We got to know the things to be focused on. It would surely help us tune up for the upcoming events at SAP. In the end, it’s not winning that matters, but the experience.
This is not all, it’s not the end of the world. The game has just begun! :smile:
- Sindhuja Palla
(Team 403.Forbidden, Scholar 2Yr | 2014)
