Satakshi Garg

Technology, programming, and hackathons have become Satakshi’s life, and she loves every bit of it. She finds the process of building new projects, debugging them, and further improving them to be peaceful. She feels inexplicable happiness from taking ideas in her head and turning them into tangible projects. Satakshi has very keen observational skills so she is always thinking about how to improve a project from a user’s perspective and eager to figure out the technical implementations—as a hobby she is building a presentation on different ways Google can improve their various products. She doesn’t favor a certain type of technology, having done projects in AR/VR, cybersecurity, machine learning, website development, and more; rather, she enjoys the journey of figuring out how to use tools to turn her mental images into reality. Above all else, she is a competitive programmer who loves solving problems and participating in live contests, and hackathons are where she finds peace.

Satakshi feels that being a passionate developer and competitive programmer, such as she is, is an important combination for a technical mind to prosper. Her innovative ideas and technical skills are reflected in the impressive number of hackathon accolades under her belt obtained from working on only 12 projects. She has won an international hackathon, ranked in the top 20 out of 500 teams at a national hackathon, qualified for Google Code Jam and the Facebook Hacker Cup Qualifications Round in her first year at college, a PB of ranking top 900 among 33000+ participants in a Codeforces contest, worked on India's First VR-Book Project and was selected by Google to be among the top 126 of 15000+ applicants chosen for their WE Program. Satakshi also organizes free workshops for people outside of her college and WTEF Fellowship spaces on a number of topics, as she believes in the power of spreading knowledge.

The Peer Programming Hub is a community for Competitive Programmers that Satakshi is especially proud of, as she founded the free CP Camp, designed its program, and organizes events so that programming enthusiasts can hone their skills. The camp is based on the idea of maintaining a streak, competing with others to do coding activities as many days in a row as possible which helps to reinforce what they learn. The camp has 4 different difficulty levels—Sergeants, Knights, Captains, Commanders—and the final survivors with the longest coding streaks become WarLords. Satakshi has herself designed the entire Game Code, using Web Scraping, in just a span of 2 days.

Satakshi first learned of the hacker community when a member of the Google WE  community asked if someone had prior AR-VR knowledge to help with a project. Satakshi reached out, and they became friends as they partnered up for her first hackathon, To the Moon and Hack 2020. The plan was to build a rocket launch model using AR, and Satakshi suggested they build an entire universe experience—the project won second place at the international event, a major win for her first hackathon.

During Halloween in 2020, Satakshi participated in MLH’s Hack or Treat event and built her favorite project VampAR, a virtual Halloween party hosted in AR. The event had already started when she decided to participate, so with no team members, she asked her brother and sister to be her teammates. They had no AR experience, but Satakshi had fun helping them learn throughout the event and found it awesome helping two non-technical people build a technical project. They also filmed the entire demo video together which was a blast, and ended up having a great Halloween party in person too.

Whether building projects at hackathons or organizing events, Satakshi is a proper team player. She has a very organized style of work that considers the strengths and skills of each individual on her team, and she is quick to think of solutions to any problems that arise. In organizing events, Satakshi tries her best to suggest ideas that are beneficial for both the organizers and the attendees; for example, in organizing live workshops for her college’s GDSC and IEEE communities, Satakshi suggested the use of Google Meet or Zoom over Youtube to livestream. More people watch Youtube streams after they are finished than watch them live, while Google Meet or Zoom would promote live attendance and interaction and organizers could still upload the recording after the fact.

Hackathons have helped Satakshi become able to think of great project ideas quickly, build her skills, and then start working on the project. This spontaneity and willingness to take initiative have given her valuable organizational and leadership skills. In building projects with teams of people she didn’t yet know over consecutive days, Satakshi gained meaningful communication skills in learning how to interpret and work with the ideas that others are trying to convey. Also, learning to pitch projects with teammates in the best way possible for a panel of judges is a business skill that is extremely valuable in technological fields, and which Satakshi will certainly use in her future profession.