“Hey, there’s this Hackathon being organized at DBIT tomorrow. Let’s go.” I said to my friend. Next day, we were at Mumbai Hackathon, trying to make an app.

A bit of background. We were students pursuing Computer Engineering from Mumbai. The coding culture here is not very good for enthusiastic coders like us. But maybe that’s just an excuse. So naturally, we got excited hearing about the Hackathon and immediately registered.

Back to the Hackathon. The place was quiet and the ambience was perfect for coding. We had a rough idea of what we were going to build. We took out our laptops and started setting up the proxy which bugged us all day.

So here we were, competing with professionals and 6 member teams. While roaming around, I got intimidated by a guy in the adjacent group. He was using Vim. So hardcore!

The next day, we got a few hours to wrap up. I got an idea. I immediately deployed our app on a free server.

The presentations started. We got to see what other people built. Amazing stuff. During our presentation, we engaged everybody to use our app. Now that was not done by any team. So, it may leave an impression.

The Hackathon ended. Those where 24 hours of pure fun!

A couple of days later, we were discussing about our app adding more features (and removing some!). I got a notification. It was a mail from MH. The first line goes “Congratulations, …” and I didn’t read the rest. We celebrated the moment for a few minutes. We had won Mumbai Hackathon. Yay!

I went to the organizers’ office to collect our prize. I asked if I could get an internship there. I got interviewed (sort of). They gave me an offer letter which I didn’t expect.

So, here I am, working at Frappé.