Hackfest

Hackfest

Hackfest is an event conducted as part of Shaastra , the technical festival of IIT MADRAS . You can more details at hackfest@shaastra. I was one of the people responsible for organizing the event and let me assure you , it was one "hack" of an event.

I was thinking of having a sort of a conclusion post for Hackfest . But then , I started wondering why Hackfest was conducted in the first place . I mean , why do we take all the pains in the world to get mentors to come here and give talks . Select over a 100 participants and then stay awake the whole night for 3 days during Shaastra ? I tell you , on this side of the fest it's easy to say , because I wanted to !! Ask any of the organizers that question during the event and you will hear a very different answer :p.

But coming back to the point, why exactly is Hackfest conducted . As Yuvi Panda , one of the mentors at this time's Hackfest ( a former Hackfest participant :)  ) put it , Hackfest is all about making friends . To quote him , "You are fooling yourself if you think you come to hackfest to learn hacking . This place is more to find like-minded friends , get to know those people and stay in touch with them . " . This is one field where collaboration is very essential . The database of knowledge presently is so huge that you need help from others . And that's where Hackfest was good . It helped people make more friends . Be it the mentors or the co-participants , they were one big group of geeks who were willing to give up sleep to code!!

Hackfest has always been about interaction. People interacting with mentors and forming bonds that stretch a lifetime . This time , I am pleased to say that Hackfest sucked less than it did last time :p . We managed to get the workshops running much faster than last time with a delay of only 1 hour ( which is awesome considering that  last time , it took a delay of a day to set them up ) . We did have a few problems with Arduino but then they were sorted out too. We had an amazing three days . Each night was fun and the early morning's even better . All the random talks that we had were insane.

What more could a geek ( note the usage of geek not nerd !! ) , want from a technical festival . It was inspiring to learn from these mentors ( a special mention of Vishesh here .. his enthusiasm was mind blowing ) . They had so much of knowledge and all the fun that we had was amazing . Overall we had a lot of fun and I hope I can some day say I share the same amount of passion for CS field as they did ! It was really nice knowing them .

As for the participants, I can't say much but I hope that they enjoyed the event that we worked really hard to set up. We would love to have all of them back for next year's Hackfest :) . 

PS :

1 All those mindless talks that we had did give some amazing links . At one point , Vishesh came up with this hilarious page where someone actually used science to prove that Santa Claus does not exist . Read more here . And to add to that , we then found a rebuttal to that here

2 Whatever you do , if you have anything to do with CSE , then don't read this . I promise you that once you have read this , you will only have complaints on why you wasted your entire life !! I mean , come on , can we really do all that in 4 years .