Won So Hard, Forgot to study

week 33

Hello hello hello. What’s up people, how are you all doing?

So I have my exam in literally two days… but I still couldn’t stop myself from writing this newsletter. A lot of crazy things happened recently. I’m genuinely excited to share all of it with you.

Hackathon Win

Alright, main thing. We won the hackathon.

If you’ve been reading my previous newsletters, you know I’ve talked about losing hackathons before and learning from them. This time it finally worked out.

Hearing our name as the winner was honestly crazy. That moment of validation after all the work felt amazing, and it just makes me want to do more hackathons again.

Apart from that, what we built was actually very simple. One thing I’ve learned from previous hackathons is that you don’t need to build something overly complex. You just need to solve the problem clearly.

Our project was for disaster management. We built a dashboard where authorities could access important information quickly, along with a Flutter app and a WhatsApp interface for easier communication.

If you want to see it, I recorded a pretty scuffed demo you can check out. I don’t think I mentioned it in the video, but we also built a WhatsApp bot using Twilio.

Judges Impressed

Also, the judges were actually surprised by what we built. The hackathon was only about six to seven hours, and they kept asking if we really made all of it in that time.

A big reason it worked was the team. There were three of coders, and everyone knew what they were doing. That made the whole process much easier. We were honestly having fun the whole time, walking around, eating good food, messing around and still managed to finish everything.

judges even told me he really liked our work and said if there are freelancing opportunities in the future we should connect. He also said if we decide to continue building the project we can reach out to him, which was pretty cool. I will probably explore that more after my exams.

Paper Website

Apart from the hackathon, something else cool happened.

Since my exams are here, I realized there isn’t really a proper website for my college where people can easily find mid sem papers. For end sems there is a site, but nothing organized for mid sems. A senior had already collected a lot of first year papers, so I used that and built a simple website to make everything easy to access.

I basically got the whole site running from a single prompt and deployed it. A lot of people in college have been using it and sending really nice messages about it, which has been pretty fun to see.

Vibe Coding

Let’s talk about something a bit deeper: vibe coding.

This past month has been wild. I was doing my internship, researching, won a hackathon, and built around 10 to 12 websites. The funny thing is I barely touched the code myself. Maybe less than an hour in total. Most of it was done using tools like Cursor, Cloud Code, and Codex which I got access to through my internship.

Honestly, it changed how I think about building. Instead of writing everything line by line, I just describe what I want and iterate with the AI. The tools are insanely good now.

It also makes me wonder about the future. Things like hackathons might look very different in the next three to four years. The bigger question for me is what direction I want to take. Do I want to be a builder or a pure coder?

If I focus on being a builder, tools like this feel like a huge advantage. But if someone wants to go deep into coding, then areas like infrastructure or DevOps might become more important because those are harder to automate.

At the same time, AI still needs someone who understands what’s happening. It can generate a lot of code, but it can also generate nonsense. You still need experience to guide it, fix things, and know whether what it wrote actually makes sense.

So it’s a weird but fascinating shift to watch while it’s happening.

Apart from Work

this week holi was also there, if u don’t know about holi google it, but yeah fun outing

also

One more fun thing from this month.

The internship I’ve been doing is actually unpaid, but the founders and people there are amazing. One day they were like, you’ve been working for free, so today it’s on us. Order whatever pizza you want.

Me and the seniors were thinking maybe it was a test or something, but we just went for it. We ended up ordering pizzas worth around ₹10,000. Proper fancy Italian ones. It was honestly pretty funny.

Overall, this month has just been really fun. Internship, building things, the hackathon win, meeting cool people. It gave me a nice motivation boost.

And honestly, if I have to thank someone, it’s myself for just continuing to try things and putting myself out there. I’ll probably keep doing more of that going forward.

thank for being on this journey with me

bye ye

tatat tata

shrit