Few weeks ago while going for Josh talks I visited InQ innovation for checking out pehia bimonthly meetup. I met Yadav and Syam there and I registered for Mozilla Kerala code sprint with the help of them.
The night before the big event another idea stricked me! I asked Syam, is it possible to change my ticket from participant to volunteer. Fortunately there was a slot and I became a proud volunteer for the code sprint. I love to participate in hackathons, the team work and the brain storm. But this time I planned to contribute on organising and see the innovative minds working as a third person.
That night Mehar connected me with a specially abled AI dev Rejin who is partially blind! I contacted him and learned he is currently in Kochi. So I asked him to join us for the Hackathon and arranged his ticket some how. He is from a place Athani in Kochi and it’s a bit far from KTIZ, our venue for code sprint. He has problem with traveling because of the vision problem. Here comes the power of communities! I asked in the code sprint group for someone coming from athani and found my friend Chithra is coming from there. She helped Rejin to reach our venue.
Finally the event started on 14th morning and I saw lots of energetic people rushing into our beautiful venue.
There were a good amount of girls and first year students participation for the event and that’s a great thing. Yadav and Navneeth introduced participants to Mozilla and Mozilla Kerala community. His intro was super cool!
Then we started with an icebreaker session. All the volunteers guided our participants in icebreaker with fun activities and intros.
After the icebreaker session jancy jose took a wonderful session about cyber security.
It was time to start the hack. I introduced the 6 projects to our participants. Among the ideas there was women safety and Malayalam OCR projects and a data collection for machine learning project. I shared my experience with working in this domains with them. I then joined the team assigned to me to lead and we started hacking.
The whole 36 hours was super dope. We talked a lot, took sessions to small groups about the things we know, Learned a lot from each others, played table tennis.
Opened our minds to the like minded peers. I don’t know anything that happened this year made me happy more than this one.
I am not saying in the end a lot of cool products came out. No, it didn’t. But lots of students got their first Hackathon experience and the Mozilla Kerala team made it memorable for the entire life of each participants. More than 10, Linux distro installations happened during the event. We all learned a lot of amazing things from people like Sharad , Vipin and Navneeth.
Check out this blog post by Akshay, one of our participant!
https://twitter.com/TheCoolFanBoi/status/1019246675678728192
Check out this beautiful writings by my fellow volunteers Mufeeda and R Praveen Pai.
For me I laughed a lot, had a lot of fun, met lots of new people and the people I missed a lot. That’s the power of an open hack. When we remove the competition part of a hackathon all this will happen.
This is Rejin helping the Malayalam OCR team to build a Malayalam learning app for kids.
Check out what Ann Philip , one of the team lead has to say about the code sprint!
That’s it!
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