My first hackathon experience

One week ago, I participated in my very first hackathon.. HackNUThon. I had no idea how amazing the first experience was going to be for me.
There were a total of 600 participants from 200 universities.

The difficulties

At first, our team wasn't even complete, we were short one member as he was sick. And two of the other members has an exam on the first day, and an interview on the second.

But, we chose the webdev - backend track by Tech Holding and began to hack.

The task

The task was to create a middleware app that would be able to provide bi-directional communication between different types of APIs, meaning, it should be able to communicate and translate REST, SOAP and GraphQL APIs.

This task seemed out of my league, but it was the only one that made sense to us. So, we decided to go with it.

The idea

We were going to build a middleware that would allow multiple chat platforms that use different APIs (REST, SOAP, GraphQL) to communicate with each other.

We decided to build the whole thing in Express and NodeJS, used MongoDB as our database.

Results

We were able to complete the task and submit it on time. Now, we were waiting for the results to be announced. We were not expecting to win anything, but we were hoping to get a mention for our efforts.

And... the top 5 teams from each track were announced and we were shocked.

Our team landed 3rd position in the webdev - backend track. We were so happy and excited. We were not expecting this at all.

Thank you

I would like to thank my teammates for their efforts and hard work.
I would also like to thank the organizers for hosting such an amazing event.
And, I would like to thank you for reading this blog post.

Feel free to reach out on Twitter and Discord.

See you soon! 👋