I started participating in hackathons during my first year of college. At that time, I had very little idea about how hackathons actually worked. I just knew that people were building interesting things, networking with smart developers, and sometimes even winning prize money. That sounded exciting enough for me to start.

Since then, I’ve participated in around 14 hackathons, as far as I can remember.

In the beginning, I lost almost every single one.

And honestly, losing repeatedly was frustrating.

I would spend days building projects, staying awake till late night, submitting demos with high expectations — and then see other teams win while my project got ignored. At one point, I started questioning whether I was even good enough for hackathons.