Symphony of Achilles

Beginning of Chaos

While I was still figuring out the whole “college life” thing in the first semester, SDSLabs announced Syntax Error, the hackathon that took over the entire first year like a fever. I barely knew how to write a basic program, let alone build a project from scratch. As a fresher, I was pretty clueless, but but determined to dive into the world of development. I teamed up with Shashank and Vatsal—two guys I met through a chain of “I know a person who knows a person.” Little did I know, they would go on to become my go-to hackathon team, Higure Rakshas (Team ka naam kaafi shinchan-esque tha, so I thought I should tell you that)

We met for brainstorming sessions in our rooms, but we ended up doing everything except that- jamming sessions, cracking jokes, and getting onto each other’s nerves. After a while, we were super tired and before we knew it, we had procrastinated our way into the next morning without a single idea.

Our first thought was to look at past projects, you know, to “get inspired” or maybe sneak in a little help. We even tried using ChatGPT, but we only ended up with a list of terrible ideas. One project that really blew our minds was from last year’s hackathon—an Air Guitar project that was just so cool. For a brief moment, we even considered making an Air Hand Cricket game, but after a lot of deliberation (and a few laughs), we dropped it.

The first 26 hours passed with us doing everything but coding (Yes, hum hackathon ke beech me classes gaye the 🙃) . We came up with weird, funky ideas and kept going to the seniors with them. They patiently listened to our madness and pushed us in the right direction. After what felt like a million brainstorming sessions, we finally returned to our very first idea: Symphony—a guitar-controlled keyboard. (Definitely not as crazy as it sounds)

Excited, we pitched the idea to the senior mentors at Labs, and to our surprise, they told us that this was something we can work on! But then came the reality check—we had only 16 hours left to build the entire thing.

Forging Symphony

None of us knew where to begin, so we spent the next few hours researching, trying to figure out how to bring Symphony to life. Exhausted and on the verge of giving up, we reached out again to the mentors who told us how to start the project.

We decided to use Python, mainly because it was easy to work with and had a wide range of libraries. At one point, our project required us to learn something called the Fast Fourier Theorem (FFT).

After struggling with wave theories for hours (I absolutely loathe wave theories now), we stumbled upon a Python library that handled everything in just two lines of code. ( Lesson of the day : Python has a library for everything 🙂)

With our project finally complete, we thought we could sleep. But just as we were catching our breath, we realized we still had to record a video, push our code onto GitHub, and write an introduction file (Literal sleep deprived, coffee-driven, half-dead people) . Thankfully, the hackathon was extended by 30 minutes, and we managed to submit everything just in time.

After staying awake for more than 20 hours, dead tired, we crashed into our beds—only to be woken up by a call saying we had to present our project. Anxious and exhausted, we dragged ourselves to the SDSLabs room to present Symphony in front of the seniors. It was nerve-wracking, especially after not sleeping, but we somehow managed to get through the technical questions and use cases they threw at us.

To our surprise, we were selected to present Symphony in front of the judges via a virtual Meet call. This was the big moment. We answered every question we could, justifying the “need” for our guitar-controlled keyboard like it was a “revolutionary” product. I’m pretty sure we made up some answers on the spot, but well, that’s how you win a hackathon 😉.

Finale

In the end, with just 168 lines of code, a whole lot of wave theories, a string of funny GitHub commits, and endless banter, we somehow pulled off a winning project. We annoyed our roommates, called each other names out of frustration, but through it all, we created something we were genuinely proud of.

Syntax Error, my very first hackathon, will forever be etched in my memory. It hooked me to coding in a way I never expected and taught me a valuable lesson: nothing is as difficult as it seems if you put your heart into it.

P.S. Its “a-kee-lees” not “ak-hi-lesh”, no matter what people tell you :)