What I Learned from Hackathons (and Losing One!)
Published:
Hackathons have been among the best learning experiences of my career.
I’ve participated in two major ones:
- 🏆 Open IIT Data Analytics (2021) — 1st place out of 48 teams. Built a music popularity predictor with Voting Classifiers (91.2% accuracy).
- 💡 HackGT 12 (2025) — Built BackpackMate AI, a travel assistant using Mastra + LangChain + FastAPI.
Lessons learned
- Speed ≠ sloppiness — rapid iteration teaches clarity under pressure.
- LLMs are only as smart as your pipeline — retrieval design matters more than model choice.
- Losing is learning — HackGT taught me far more than winning IIT.
Hackathons show recruiters that you can go from idea to prototype in hours — a skill that translates directly into startup and research settings.
Figure: Difference between the classical lexical retrieval and the influence based retrieval for large language models
Figure: Binary grading makes “guess when unsure” optimal → higher hallucinations.