I participated in Djangothon on 22-23 August - a 24hr hackathon organized by HackerEarth as a part of 10 year anniversary celebrations of Django web framework. I got the awesome team partner Sharat MR and also Devyani Kota. The core idea of hackathon was to contribute back to Django framework.

I was very excited, it was the first time for me to be in an offline hackathon as a participant.

We had absolutely no idea what to build, but I wanted something to be build using web sockets. Sharat gave a +1 for that. After so many discussions finally decided - and thus came up with Django-engage (we realized then that already 4 hours had passed since the start of hackathon!)

Planning, getting stuck, trashing that idea, coming up with another idea, working on it, getting stuck, meeting silly errors which seems to be huge at first, thinking of stopping and going back to home, then again sitting and fixing the issue, getting a non-broken model at the end.. all crazy times!. Sharat and me did all the coding and bug fixing. And finally for the presentation session, Devyani introduced our team and we have done the demo.

We didn’t won, but the outcomes are fun, energy, inspiration, satisfaction and a lot more! We nailed it!!

Our project: django-engage

Django-engage is a solution for real time communication between user and admin, we have build a chat system using websockets.

The realtime connection is achieved with Django-SwampDragon, a websocket supporting lib; and authentication check is done with SwampDragon-Auth lib.

Source code

Open sourced at: https://github.com/djangothon/django-engage

and another remote at: https://github.com/Praseetha-KR/django-engage

Hackathon progress log from twitter