50p Hacknight
Code💻, Coffee☕️ and Conversations🗣
On Friday the 13th👻, we had our first Hacknight of this year- the 50p Hacknight. This was my first hacknight after joining HasGeek and possibly a hackathon that I’ve been at since a long time.
HasGeek has a great tradition of putting together wonderful hacknights with a great bunch of developers, designers and technology enthusiasts. Living upto that expectation seemed a little daunting. We started the hacknight with a talk by Saurabh Soni, Product Designer at Razorpay on ‘The Role of Design in the Checkout process’.
Saurabh took us through the process of explaining the minuscule details that improves the user experience. A lot of these were backed by numbers that improved conversions, sales etc. For example, here are some things that really stood out for me,then again, I’m new to design but it fascinates me to hear how designers make technology more easily accessible to people.
- Auto filling the name of the card holder based on the login information simplifies the whole checkout process for the user.
- If your card expiry date is 3/22, the moment you enter 3, the 0 is added automatically, making it 03 instead of you having to type 03.
Following Saurabh’s session, we had Akshata from Unocoin, Vivek from Coinsecure and Akshay from Razorpay talk to us about the amazing work they do. They also graciously offered to be the mentors at the hacknight.
Post dinner(which also had Vegan & Keto options), the participants buried their heads in the computers and started hacking.
The coffee machine probably brewed so much coffee that at one point, it stopped working for a brief period of time. This is when bread and Nutella can be saviors! So much that we had teams working from the pantry.
As we transitioned to Day 2, although everyone was tired, there were a lot of interesting conversations happening. Vivek told us about about an ideal world in which transactions happened through bitcoins and how that would impact tax payment. This was followed by some discussions on anonymizing payments and why people would want to make transactions that can’t be tracked back to them.
At around 10:30 AM our judges- Vivek, Akshata, Akshay and Shashank started the day by explaining the criteria for judging. This was followed by the team demos and pitching sessions.
We had a really amazing pool of ideas. The judges loved interacting with the participants and had a great time reviewing their projects. Some of the ideas that really stood out were-
- Messenger bot to donate to local NGO’s using Bitcoin
- Offline payments using Bluetooth and UPI
Some of the areas the judges focused on while deciding the winners were the novelty of the idea, feasibility and technical implementation.
After the demos, Shashank and Akshay from Razorpay did an Ask Me Anything session on payments. As soon as the AMA was done, we announced the winners.
All the participants got swags and t-shirt from HasGeek, Coinsecure, Razorpay and Unocoin. It was a wonderful wrap to a great hacknight.
The winners also received free tickets to the 50p Conf. If you’re interested in the payments ecosystem in India and would love to have more conversations around that, you should definitely attend the conference!
