🗓️ The Day:

On the day of 26 July 2025, 09:30 AM started a 30-hour hackathon. My first full-night hackathon I pulled. Around 700 teams were shortlisted out of supposedly 3000 teams who submitted their idea. Yes, they made a Guinness World Record with the maximum number of hackathon participants (really, we witnessed the Guinness record given to them).

It started with a huge line of participants entering the arena and getting assigned their tables. It was a hassle for the volunteers, but kudos — they pulled it off nice. And the HACKATHON BEGINS.

💡 Idea Submission:

Around 34 days before the day, I came across a hackathon conducted by Google and Hack2Skill and shared it with my only friend, the team leader with whom I won a hackathon — Sadhana Das. With this, team Hackemon, with two members, rises again.

After some discussion, we concluded on giving it a shot. We registered. One fine weekend we decided to sit and come up with an idea to submit. The first challenge: "Managing City Data Overload", bulb glows and the discussion begins with glowing faces.

After a lot of discussions and a lot of scribbling in my tab, we came up with a product that solves the challenge. The idea is:

Geo+, a Gemini-powered, multimodal AI agent that monitors, understands, and responds to real-time city events using citizen-submitted reports and AI reasoning. By combining intelligent prioritization, fraud detection, and geo-aware alerts, it delivers a live dashboard that empowers both commuters and city authorities to make faster, safer decisions.

Perfect for smart city rollouts, mobility partners, and emergency response networks.

🚀 Hackathon Begins:

After enjoying my idli and 2 varieties of chutneys, we started our app build — but the Wi-Fi was down, the mobile network was down for everyone. The only light in the cave was an Ethernet cable on the table.

At my table, we had 4 teams with 2 members each. A team with 2 second-year girls from Coimbatore was using it. Management promised a fix in some time. Till then, my team went on a plan of action discussion, came up with steps to take — along with chocolates, nuts, and sodas.

Another light in the cave: whoever used Windows laptops got the Wi-Fi connected. Unfortunately, my team was using Macs, but fortunately, the girls' team had Windows — so the Ethernet cable got free and I took it.

We started the build but not everyone was building — people were still asking for the Wi-Fi to be back.

Lunch came and dinner came.
After stretching on the bean bags, saw the time was 11 PM, found ourselves a physical activity — walk around the arena.

An announcement from the management:

• No checkpoint till tomorrow 9:30 AM
• Final submission pushed to 12
• Due to the Wi-Fi problem, a new prize category for "Best Idea" was added
• This update woke up a lot of people with new energy that Red Bull didn't give

An addition to my achievements: I pulled an all-nighter developing the app, thanks to Augment AI in VS Code helping me during hard times. Also, thanks to the Google mentors in the Agentic help room for guiding and the nice talk I had.

Learnt a lot on how to use Google’s ecosystem for Agents and LLMs with their Firebase and Cloud.

Had my midnight snack and judged people sleeping in the arena (no offence). There were people who came prepared with bedsheets nicely done. By 7 AM, I wrapped up my project, got refreshed, and stood in line for 10 mins to use the toilet.

📤 Final Submission:

Due to the fact that we wrapped up the development and PPT to be submitted, we took a chill time, walked through the arena, went out to check the place where the final pitching would happen.

We came back to the table to realize mentor checkpoints had started, we had 2 hours for final submission, and the PPT format was different for the final submission.

After a hustle of 45 mins, Sadhana pulled it off and wrapped up the PPT to submit.

Now the problem was the time mentors take to conduct the checkpoint. As time passed and the mentors were nowhere in sight — even after submission — we had to wait through lunch. People lost patience (we too), tired and exhausted through the night.

We realized our team was the last to give the checkpoint, and the time finally came.

Two mentors came who said, “Don’t explain your idea, just show the prototype.” Still, we went ahead with explaining the idea a bit and tried showing the prototype — one mentor left the spot and another asked questions and expected one-word answers for brief questions.

Was it rushed? Yes.

We felt that this could have been done better with a proper brief on our solution.

🏁 Result:

After the hustle of the checkpoint pitch, we had our lunch and walked around to look up on ourselves.

Got to know a team from our table named Refi (hope I'm correct) got shortlisted for the final pitch. They were a team of 2 — one did an MBA in a fancy French university and another a Data Scientist with 3 years of experience. I had my small talks with them throughout the days, enjoying the time.

Happy and proud that a tablemate of ours got shortlisted.

Our category result came — we were not shortlisted. Not surprised.

Came out of the arena with packed bags and a promise to do better at the next hackathon we go.

And we said to ourselves: we had a good day.

🧠 Key Takeaways:

• Know your USP well.
• If the hackathon is conducted by a community based on a product or focused on a product, make sure to use it as much as you can. This might have weightage equal to the idea itself.
• Attend more hackathons.

This made me realize:
I can pull off a version 1 development in 24 hours. I'm strong.

💪✨