The sirrup of that coffee, those bloody red eyes, wanting to say take me home I want a break. It was not just a competition; it was a test of human machines. ‘How much time left?’ Whispered a nerdy guy at the back to his teammate who just completed his power nap and came to work in his temporary office. It was 5.30 in the morning. I just finished filling the coffee cup from that tiny coffee machine at the back. Now sitting at my so-called thinking table, recalling the memories made here, had no idea what’s going to be in store for us. We were the organizers along with Nagpur first. On 30thSeptember 2016 we arrived in our respective cabs to the venue bearing the September heat. Only discovering that we had tons of work lined up as we had to transform an auditorium into a makeshift completion venue.
Right from arranging tables, setting up the internet at a place where there was no access to the internet, setting up power lines for their computers. We had to do everything. The first line of action of me was to take several printouts in minimum time for the registrations, inauguration speech, and all the numbers required for the competition.
On the other side, the venue was in a transformation mode. All the tables were set up, stage was all set for the guests.
App-a-thon was a 48 hours coding competition, held at Nagpur’s renowned Ramdeobaba College of Engineering between 30th September 2016 & 02nd October 2016. We had to work day and night to keep the event up and alive. It was a unique platform for developers as their idea for making a smart app gets recognition. The event was partnered by Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC).
NMC was looking forward to this competition to get some productive apps in order to find the means to make Nagpur a smart city.
With the help of ‘Lemon Ideas’ it chalked out some of the problems faced by the fellow citizens and the same was given to the participants as a Problem Statement. Expectations were high from the participants to develop a solution in form of a powerful working app.
Competition was started with speech of Hon’ble Municipal Commissioner Shravan Hardikar encouraging the participants for this tireless, non-stop task and made it clear what NMC was expecting from App-a-thon.
Journey started on evening of 30th October. Nearly 120 participants rushed to the venue. There were diversified participants from right from companies like Persistent, TCS, Globallogic to the students of Ramdeo Baba College, St. Vincent Palotti College & many others.
The coders were determined to overcome the difficulties and worked day and night to reach the goal i.e. to give back the city in with they live in, in the form of an app to make the orange city smarter. He competition was all up and running, day and night without any break. Facilities at the venue like sleeping arrangements, food, tea, coffee by full time LSE volunteers made their 48 hours journey a bit easier.
Winners were awarded with catchy cash Prizes of Rs.100000 in total and a direct entry into the National App-a-thon. Many were rewarded with incubation at Lemon Ideas. Felicitation was conducted by computer language guru Mr. Yashwant Kanitkar, Mr. Ramnath Sonawane (Additional Municipal Commissioner, NMC), Tech-Guru Mr. Nithin Gujrati and Mr. Hakimuddin Ali.
App-a-thon was powered by Lemon Ideas. Calderys and Persistent sponsored the event. It was difficult to organize the event if it wasn’t for Buzzing Labs, Creatifox, Flying penguins, Nagpur First and PManifold team.
Two teams from Palloti college one team from Persistent won the competition at 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Also, 2 teams were awarded with cash prizes of 750$ and 500$ by KRUMBS.
-Manu Sharma
-Harshit Mandiya
-Shubham Charkha
(LSE Cohort 2016)
