My experience in Opencode'23
My first hackathon.
I am embarking on a journey to become a good and inspiring front-end developer like how I once saw a mesmerizing website and had goosebumps all over, or when I first realized how cool and interesting backend is really. So, I'll be documenting my journey and learnings here.
What is Opencode?
Opencode is month-long opensource event that is organized by GeekHaven, a technical society of IIIT Allahabad, that runs from mid DEC to mid JAN (usually). It hosts various projects and gives participants proper instructions to perform tasks curated to help participants grow their corresponding skills.
What about projects?
There were projects in:
Design
App development
Game development
Cyber Security
AI/ML
WebD Frontend
WebD Backend
Blockchain
Competitive Coding
Now that you have an idea about what Opencode is, lets gets to main topic, my experience:
What I gained from participating in it?
Became a part of community :
As I participated in it, I was introduced to a community (discord server) of curious people where there were beginners like me to individuals with more than 4 years of significant GitHub contribution activity. Recently as I was streaming through different channels I came across a person introducing themselves while enlisting the events they have been a part of, this is where I get to know about those events and asked them to tell me more, that they did and I was even able to register in one of them, but what's the big deal?
The big deal is knowledge that I gained from that less than 1-minute conversation. The events were all but new to me. That amazed me!
Riddance of my fear of opensource and contributions :
Did I tell you that this was my very first hackathon? I was scared of contributing due to lack of knowledge and non-initiative but this hackathon ended all by providing precise and very very beginner friendly detailed description of tasks and helped me helped me do what I wanted to.
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code" - Linus Torvalds :
What's better that hands-on experience? I got hands on experience of the tech skills I wanted to practice, learn more and build on projects to. Like version control, GitHub pages, programming languages(though I only wrote code in HTML/CSS) but it was well worth each and every effort.
Professional connections:
"Birds of a feather flock together", as you interact with people, those with similar interests as yours would naturally like to interact more. And I've noticed that this type of productive interaction can give you a lot of insight sometimes.
How do I rate this program?
In terms of:
Fun : 10/10
Competitiveness : 9/10
Learning : 10/10 [subjective, of course]
Return of Investment (wrt time) : 8/10
Interaction with community : 8/10
All in all, I really enjoyed this program and would say it was awesome!
Note: Cheery on top, all the participants get certificate of participation as well :-)
