One of the craziest weekends of my life

So there I was, having fun with some of my friends, laptop in my hand, on yet another friday evening - I had nothing better to do than just sit and scroll through twitter - even though my friends were right there. Maybe I should spend time with them? But they aren’t doing anything “productive” - right?

I was also working to record a youtube video for my channel that’s been recently blowing up, making a “day in the life”, a devlog while building an app

I shut my laptop and decide to go out with them to the market, extremely excited - and I said yes to them. They all got ready and just as we were gonna leave our dorm (Tooker house), I get a call from another friend, Keval…

Bro, are you coming to the hackathon?

Welp, UGHHHHHH I signed up for this like a week ago. So I’m supposed to go. But this is at the Poly campus - almost 30 kilometers away from campus. And tomorrow, the campus will celebrate the festival of Holi - the festival of colors and meeting people and having fun with friends and having indian food. And tomorrow I also have to attend this coding competition in the morning for which i have to prepare today. Omg, how will I manage all of this while being in the. middle of a hackathon organized by LOS ALAMOS LABORATORY THEMSELVES, be able to socialize with people and have fun? There’s no way I’m attending this, it’s yet another hackathon and anyways i have a lot of other things to do. There’s no way I’m doing a hackathon and a coding competition simultaneously.

Anyways, I said yes.

And within the next 10 minutes, I was in the car, with a cup of starbucks in my hand and heading towards the Poly campus.

The prompt was rather difficult to understand and build upon, it was about solving one of the issues at Los Alamos National Laboratory - they wanted to build better manufacturing and observability for making high explosives.

Alright, this will be fun! Very multidisciplinary - We need understanding of a LOT of things that we currently have no idea about, we need to understand a lot of chemistry, like how explosives and stuff work. We need to have an understanding of manufacturing systems and how they work. And then come up with a solution that’s good enough to help Los Alamos Lab. We didn’t really focus on win but actually developing a solution that helps.

The weekend

We thought of a lot of different weird solutions - “Hardware? maybe?” we thought - let’s try hardware. One of the teammates Keval had a lot of knowledge in working with it so we tried to design our own sensor array - the whole thing - with a 3D design and all of that.

The plan was that we would use the sensor array to get the data from the manufacturing proces and then show the data on a dashboard with a lot of fancy stuff like graphs and charts.

BUTTTT… after hours of designing the model and planning everything out PERFECTLY, we found out that

3D PRINTING DIDN’T WORK 😭

So… i guess we’ll have to go with a different approach.

Here’s the thing - we had no idea what to build. like, we didn’t even know how those explosives are manufactured. Part of our team read multiple research papers to find out how it’s manufactured and we were like, “this is so cool” and found out ways to make it software-only.

anyways… without going into much detail, we made an entire chemical simulator using a very old simulation software and then used it to make up values for our analysis. Then, I quickly hooked together a dashboard with a lot of fancy stuff and used websockets to transfer data back and forth.

AAAA i’m going into too much detail. we didn’t sleep at all - it was 3 am and we were barely done. But it was time to travel back home

Day 2 - another tournament?

Back to tempe - I wake up, and friend calls me “bro, you coming to the programming tournament? You gotta come. you’re in my team and i already paid the deposit for you.”

well, f*ck.

so - it was a programming competition by WICS (women in computer science). but everyone was allowed.

here’s the rules:

• only JAVA and C++ allowed.
• no internet access
• no LLMS (not even locally, they used lockdown browser and irl people. only code on the big screen.)
• you may only print stuff/ get books for reference.

… and here’s the problem: IDK java or C++. I mean, I have coded in both the languages but nothing more than a merge sort. I didn’t even know how to split a string.

AND i had to attend Holi - my favorite festival in India. My university had organised a pretty big event for all the students with indian food and all. i HAD to be there.

But i still decided to go for the programming competition. Out of the 7 questions, we somehow, very painstakingly, only got 3 questions done in the given time. It was really difficult.

anyways… we won the competition. third place. Got a nice polaroid camera and some cash!

you know what’s even more amazing? Right after writing the code, i RAN TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAMPUS only to celebrate holi with my friends.