LinkedIn Wintathon 2020
Tags: hackathon
Published: 2020-09-03 20:34:41

I still remember seeing my fellow seniors at hostel wearing the LinkedIn Wintathon t-shirts and walking around. I was in my second year and not very sure what it was about but it looked fascinating and that was when I decided even I want to have one of those. So I googled about it. 
What is LinkedIn Wintathon? Wintathon is an all-female hackathon organized by LinkedIn Bangalore every year(since 2016) where 3rd and 4th year B.Tech, M.Tech, PhD CSE, Data Science major students get to apply and showcase their talents, ideas and coding skills. It was a fun filled experience with a lot of learning along with it. We got an all expenses paid trip to LinkedIn Bangalore, swags and loads of memories.


<h3>Round1 Online Coding Round</h3>
 

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The first round after you register is the Online Coding Round conducted on Hackerrank Platform. It was a 120-minute test which had two coding questions(1 easy and 1 medium DSA question) and one subjective question where we had to describe the hack that we wanted to build. 60 girls from all over India made it to the second round.


<h3>Round2 Connecting and building your team</h3>


If you are among the top 60 you'll receive a mail about the further process which is to build the team. Many resources would be shared with you along with a google sheet which has all the details of the qualifiers(like name, hack idea, strengths, college name, etc). These details are needed for the team building. We had to build a team of 3 and you can choose team mates who complement your skills. This is a great way to connect and make friends. You can call, text or mail fellow participants who you think would be a good fit to work with. So my team mates were from IIT Guwahati and IIIT Allahabad. 
 

<h3>Round3 Improvisation and Preparation</h3>

Once the team is formed, there'll be a month for you to decide your final hack, improvise, discuss with your mentor, get second opinions on the hack and start the implementation. But since both my team mates were 4th years we didn't implement anything major beforehand and did the complete thing in those 24 hours. You'll be assigned a mentor(LinkedIn Employee) who will help you decide the hack. Your mentor plays a crucial role in this. We had three ideas in mind and couldn't decide which one to go with and our mentor asked us to pitch all three ideas and shooted many follow up questions which helped us decide the best option. In that 1 month we learnt about many new technologies but we still didn't have a concrete idea about our hack.

<h3>Round4 The D-Day</h3>

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It was finally the day where all of us from different parts of India, who had just connected through phone-calls, mails, video-calls to meet and make our idea a product. LinkedIn had arranged flights and buses for us. As soon as we reached, we were served a grand brunch and got our swag bags which had the agenda for the day, t-shirt and goodies. There was a photobooth arranged and we were connecting with other participants in the first hour. We could choose any spot within the office for working. They had 24*7 open bistro and snacks.There were interesting sessions like drum-jam, dance sess, fun games, etc. The entire night was full of coding, sprint meet-ups with mentors and judges. We had to submit our hack the next day by 7am. We had a practice pitch with our mentors which helped us decide what all should be included, how to give the demo, how to answer counter questions, etc. The first round of judging were counducted in seperate rooms by a group of judges.

Once the first round of judging was over we were given time to relax, have breakfast and play games. Later the results were announced and our team was among the top 5 teams. *Voila*. We were given a template for the slides presentation and we had to present the hack on the main stage in front of all the participants and the judge panel which had top people working at LinkedIn. In this round we had to demonstrate why this product would be helpful for LinkedIn and not go into technical details. Later the results were announced. Though we weren't the winning team, all in all it was an enriching experience and a great platform to connect with other like minded coders.


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