Hackathon in Bangalore

#Went to a Hackathon in Bangalore

I went to Bangalore for a hackathon conducted by GrowthX at the Razorpay office, with Sarvam as one of the sponsors.

The trip itself was honestly pretty fun. I used ChatGPT for almost everything while travelling and staying there 😭. What should I eat? Where should I go? How do I get somewhere? What's nearby? Basically had an AI travel companion making half my decisions for me.

The hackathon was at the Razorpay office, which was also really cool to experience.

I met a guy called Prasanna there, we got along pretty well, and I ended up bringing him into our team. I also met a bunch of other people during the hackathon and made quite a few new friends, which honestly ended up being one of my favorite parts of the whole thing.

And completely unrelated to technology: they served California Burrito there and holy shit I loved it 😭

I think that might genuinely be one of the things I remember most clearly from the event.

Anyway, we actually had to build something.

Sarvam was sponsoring the hackathon, so we had to use their API in our project.

We decided to build software for lawyers that could take huge amounts of evidence and make it actually manageable.

Imagine a lawyer getting hours of video footage, enormous WhatsApp exports, documents and other evidence for a case.

Instead of manually going through everything, you could dump it into our system.

It would process the evidence, summarize the important parts and let you ask questions about everything you uploaded.

So you could ask:

"When did they first discuss the payment?"

"Find every time this person was mentioned."

"What happened in this video?"

and get the relevant information without manually digging through thousands of messages or watching hours of footage.

I actually really liked what we built.

It wasn't just putting "AI" somewhere because it was an AI hackathon. Going through evidence is a real pain for lawyers, especially when a single case can contain ridiculous amounts of information.

We didn't win though 😭

Obviously I would've preferred coming home with a win, but looking back, I don't think that's the main thing I remember from the trip anyway.

I remember travelling around Bangalore.

Constantly asking ChatGPT what the hell I should do next.

Building something under a ridiculous deadline.

Being inside the Razorpay office.

Meeting Prasanna and randomly turning someone I had just met into a teammate.

Meeting a bunch of other people.

Eating California Burrito for the first time and immediately loving it.

And just being surrounded by people building things.

So yeah, technically:

Went to a hackathon in Bangalore but didn't win.

But that one sentence leaves out basically everything that made the trip worth remembering.