Google Girl's Hackathon '24 experience!
I'm a pre-final year computer science student at SRM with a strong academic background and technical skills. I am actively contributing to the beginner-friendly open-source repositories to showcase my skills in web development. I love to share my knowledge of technical skills and am a pro at debugging errors.
This blog is about my journey through the Google Girls Hackathon 2024.
Kick-off session
I applied for the Google Girls hackathon on April 6. After three days of waiting, I got a confirmation email for the registration.
The program started on April 12 with a kickoff session, where approximately 4000 people joined. In the kickoff session, they introduced the program to everyone briefly.
There were three stages for this hackathon,
Learning cohort
Online Coding Challenge
Hackathon
Learning Cohort
In the learning cohort session, they taught us how to ace both technical and non-technical interviews.
Important must-cover DSA topics were discussed. Do's and don'ts in the coding interview were also discussed.
Key take away from this session :-
Start the solution for a coding problem with a very simple brute force method, and then try to optimize it.
Don't be afraid to ask questions to the interviewer.
Speak out your thoughts to approach a solution.
Explain the brute method to the interviewer and proceed with coding the optimized solution. Don't spend much time on coding the brute force method (which is unnecessary)
Pick the right data structure tool that best suits the problem.
Coding Challenge
Once the learning session is completed, there was a week-long gap for us to prepare for the coding challenge. The coding challenge took place on the HackerEarth online platform for coding.
Coding challenge pattern: two medium-level coding questions.
Time limit: 60 minutes.
After successfully qualifying from this round, the students are eligible to participate in Hackathon round. In the hackathon round, the students have to submit a working solution to the provided problem statement.
Unfortunately, I haven't got selected for the hackathon round. But I've learned a lot of things and continuing to improve my coding skills further.